Finally, a story that examines how the pharmaceutical industry may be affected by health reform's uncertain future, and what that uncertainty means for the original concessions pharma offered the Obama administration last year.

The New York Times' Duff Wilson reports:

...In return for the prospect of tens of millions of newly insured customers and a large degree of regulatory certainty, the pharmaceutical industry had agreed to pay a relatively small price: $8 billion a year in discounts and fees. It was a modest compromise for an industry with $246 billion in prescription drug sales last year.

But now, with the health care overhaul on a back burner in Washington and possibly dead for this year, drug makers are getting a sinking sense of how a piecemeal public policy future might look for them...

It is a time when bolt-from-the-blue challenges may await drug makers, compared with the carefully mapped future they had worked out with the White House and the Senate under the health care legislation.

One of those "bolts from the blue" is a "proposed tax on some patents and other intangible assets parked in overseas tax havens by American companies," Wilson writes.

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