Posted on 12/30/2003 6:43:17 PM PST by Federalist 78
Issuing patents for prescription drugs is a constitutional obligation of the Federal government, we can debate diminishing the length of these patents, but NOT issuing patents to a specific industry is blatantly unconstitutional, doing so in the name of the betterment of society, is pure socialism.
The Feds could impose price controls...but that smacks of socialism as well, they could open the US market to foreign drugs...costing Americans their jobs.
There are problems out there that simply have no "good" solutions.
I would offer prescription drug companies longer patents on products in exchange for drastically lower prices.
Protectionism only for drugs? Why just drugs? Why not steel? Why not textiles? Why not buggy whips?
Moving right along most of the drugs to be imported are made by American companies abroad, and maybe some at home for all I know. The system is designed to allow price discrimination for monopsonistic European government drug buyers. The system must and shall collapse, the sooner the better. There is no reason Americans should subsidize drug research for drugs Europeans consume. We need to allow free importation, or better yet, a most favored nation pricing law. The drug companies can't price discriminate except for volume discounts.
and make you look like a fool in the process
The only one you are capable of making a fool of is yourself and you have done that quite well.
You really should attempt to become informed on an issue before you attempt to debate.
Then again, you just may be a well informed welfare recipient.
The Crucial Elements of an Acceptable Medicare Bill by Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D.
July 16, 2003 (Backgrounder #1667)
In dealing with the Medicare bills now being considered in conference, Congress must face up to the task of legislating real reform, modernizing the program, ...
How Congress's Medicare Drug Provisions Would Reduce Seniors' Existing Private Coverage by Edmund F. Haislmaier
July 17, 2003 (Backgrounder #1668)
The House-Senate conferees now attempting to reconcile two profoundly flawed Medicare bills should go back to the drawing board and use as a blueprint the ...
State-By-State Tax Increase from Medicare Drug Benefit by Rea S. Hederman, Jr.
November 14, 2003 (WebMemo #367)
Taxpayers would see a $41 billion tax increase next year, if Congress passes the proposed Medicare prescription drug legislation and raises taxes to pay for ...
Time to Rethink the Disastrous Medicare Legislation, November 17, 2003, Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D., Robert E. Moffit, Ph.D.
The Medicare conference agreement fails the two critical requirements of a responsible drug benefit program for the nation’s seniors. The original idea underlying this legislation was never just about adding drug coverage to Medicare. It was about doing so in a way that would not lead to huge additional liabilities to future generations, and in a way that would reform the program so that it could respond to the changing needs of the elderly and disabled.[1] But the agreement will not lead to that. Instead it guts critical reforms, relegating them to a "demonstration project" that is doomed to failure. And it opens the floodgates to new entitlement spending that will mean huge taxes on future workers.
It is time for Congress and the President to go back to the drawing board and do two things:
The Cost of Medicare: What the Future Holds by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Jeff Lemieux
December 15, 2003 (Heritage Lecture #815)
Despite media reports of a landmark reform, the new Medicare law seems to be just business as usual. It will take a long time to ...
In a sense, this was the sort of bill that Medicare reformers in 1998 wanted to make sure never happened again. When the Balanced Budget Act in 1997 passed with hundreds and hundreds of lines of provisions and very little time for CBO and other policy analysts to really figure out how it would all work, a policy mess resulted. There were plenty of mistakes in both the drafting of the bill and the estimates of the bill (some of them that I made and my other colleagues at CBO made others). Staff wrote things into the law that had unintended consequences. For example, the law was supposed to improve private plan participation in Medicare, but it ended up cutting it by not quite half.
So my first conclusion is that this is not reform and that it is business as usual. What's especially distressing is that the last time we did a bill like this in 1997, Congress was somewhat apologetic. Congress said we should have a Medicare commission to figure out how Medicare should really be governed, not by this catchall of hundreds of congressional provisions which we don't really know are in the bill until after it's been enacted.
This time there has been no apology. I think with the Balanced Budget Act and with this bill there is almost a comfort level that's been found by Congress in creating this sort of congressional micromanagement of Medicare, and that worries me a little bit.
So those are my two basic conclusions: First, it's not transformation; therefore, it will cost a lot. Second, we're on a legislative path of leaving the analysis until after the votes are had, which has its ups and downs. It may be easier to get legislation that way, but we certainly don't know what we've got until after it's done and now it's all up to us to go back, read the bill extremely carefully, and work with CBO and the rest of the congressional agencies to figure out what we've got here and what we should look forward to in 2004 and beyond.
In the meantime, free importation will cause the governments in Europe to try to control the use of the drugs for just residents, but a black market would develop, and there would be shortages as leakage to the US occurs, putting pressure on the diseased system, salubrious pressure, sort of like what white blood cells due to viruses.
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