The Bush administration and the GOP Congress: promises made, promises kept.

The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to reap a windfall from a surprisingly lucrative niche market: drugs for poor people....

The windfall, which by some estimates could be $2 billion or more this year, is a result of the transfer of millions of low-income people into the new Medicare Part D drug program that went into effect in January. Under that program, as it turns out, the prices paid by insurers, and eventually the taxpayer, for the medications given to those transferred are likely to be higher than what was paid under the federal-state Medicaid programs for the poor.

...state Medicaid programs ... closely monitor drug prices, and drug makers often typically end up paying rebates to the states.

... But in creating the federal Part D program, Congress -- in what critics saw as a sop to the drug industry -- barred the government from having a negotiating role....

Since Part D went into effect, the pharmaceutical industry has raised the wholesale prices of its brand-name drugs an average of 3.6 percent.

... when it comes time for the insurers to settle accounts with the government, the costs of the 6.5 million drugs for the transferees will end up being passed along to federal taxpayers....

Gee, with the drug companies making all that extra money, maybe the numbers will get lower in stories like this:

Federal drug officials on Thursday announced the approval of a vaccine against cervical cancer....

Merck, Gardasil's maker, said a full, three-shot course would cost $360, making Gardasil among the most expensive vaccines ever made.

...A federal program is expected to provide the vaccine to 45 percent of the children in the United States for whom it is recommended. But state programs that cover other children are having trouble buying other expensive vaccines.

North Carolina, for instance, spends $11 million annually to provide every child with seven vaccines. Gardasil alone would probably cost at least another $10 million.

"Increasingly, states are asked to make a Sophie's choice about which diseases they will allow children to be hospitalized or killed by," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia....

Or this:

The federal government on Wednesday approved the first HIV treatment that packs a triple-drug cocktail into a one-a-day pill.

... The wholesale price of a 30-day supply of the pill will be $1,150.88....

Whoops -- sorry. Did I say maybe drug companies will lower drug prices? I must be on drugs.