LA City Hall------------------------------------- Merck's VIOXX®

On May 4, 2005, the Los Angeles City Council voted 14-0 to adopt the "LA-Rx" plan under which residents of the second-largest city in the U.S. (and others) would band together to aggregate their purchasing power in regard to pharmaceutical products, in order to get lower prices on these essential commodities. You can read more about this by clicking here.

Active in the effort to secure passage of this measure was the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR), a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation based in Santa Monica, California. In its own words, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is a "tax exempt, nonprofit organization deploying an in-house team of public interest lawyers, policy experts, strategists, public educators, and grassroots activists to advance and protect the interests of consumers and taxpayers."

California Politics Today spoke this afternoon with Jerry Flanagan, a consumer advocate at the FTCR, about the passage of "LA-Rx" and, more generally, about the concept of "monopsony" and the power that consumers can derive and the money they can save by aggregating their demand, not just for prescription drugs, but for health insurance and telephony, broadband Internet, and video content services.

You can listen to that conversation with Jerry Flanagan, consumer advocate at the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, California, by clicking here.