Someone Better Tell Hillary

With Hillary already wanting to lead the charge on health care reform and one of the emerging issues being the forcing of drug companies to negotiate pricing with the government, initially only for Medicare prescriptions, Hillary and company might want to take today's news on Pfizer into account.

Pfizer's stock has already taken a fifteen percent hit today because they invested about $800 million dollars in what was to be the follow up cholesterol drug to Lipitor. Significant health risks turned up in advanced trials.

While we will be reading endless stories on the tremendous profits of the pharmaceutical industry - and how the Hillary's and Jim Webb's of the world want government regulations to fix the problem, after today you likely won't hear much of the almost $1 Billion dollars that went away from Pfizer's bank account - and that's not including the stock valuation dollars.

The Heritage Foundation just happens to have a piece from Dec 1 on the topic:

In the first hundred hours of the 110th Congress, the new Congressional leadership is expected to introduce legislation to fix the prices of prescription drugs in the massive Medicare drug entitlement program. The Medicare drug benefit is a costly entitlement, and its design, particularly the congressionally ordained gaps in coverage, has no analogue in the private markets. But government price fixing is not a viable solution to any of these shortcomings.

The short term problems are bad enough. But the last thing I want is for some government appointee dictating which drugs and illnesses get research dollars and which ones don't. And that is the end point of tinkering with the free market system in health care. It isn't like we can count on government to restrain itself once it gets going in a particular direction.

If we start down the road of price controls in health care, how long before government decides it can also disseminate products and services better than the private sector? You know, just like your driver's license.

Comments

[Doc]

The government has been deeply interfering with medical affairs for decades in the form of the FDA and the state medical licensing acts. These two entities are responsible for the fact that health care is nearly unaffordable if you don't have 'insurance' or some government payout. Things like the Medicare Rx Drug plan and similar boondoggles are just variations on a theme long established. There is no free market in medicine, more's the pity.

Eliminate the FDA and the medical practice acts, and prices would drop like a rock as availability skyrockets. Sure, some would be 'substandard'; that's called a free market: you're free to patronize anyone you want to, with no Big Daddy gov't to tell you who's a 'good' doctor and who's 'bad', or what medicines are 'good' and which are 'bad' (as if gov't was competent to actually tell you that!). Private entities a la Consumer Reports, Underwriter's Listed, etc, would inevitably spring up from the ashes of the FDA and the medical licensing boards to review docs and drugs and report on their findings, at a fraction of the price of the current gov't monstrosities. The end result would be a massive drop in health care costs, and an improvement in the health of the nation, as fewer people would be w/o the basic services which they currently can not afford. I would be a happier man, even tho' I would face greatly increased competition, with a concomitant drop in income, as all of my patients would be able to afford their medicines, specialist care, and advanced testing. No one would bother with health insurance; even a bypass would probably only cost a few thousand dollars. An appendectomy would be a few hundred.

O well. I can dream. Maybe someday, enough people will get tired of being told by the gov't which doctor they can see. Maybe someday they'll realize that it's unjust for some people to be taxed to pay for somebody else's medicine.