Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at Digg and at Reddit and in Stumbleupon and Delicious
They decry drug shortages, then support price controls that insure that the shortages will worsen.
The next step is that Pharma companies are going to need to get money from governments to offset the difference because of price controls. OR....
The pharma companies are going to have to stop selling their drugs in certain countries when the patens expire.
If the government get’s involved in helping the pharma companies overcome the shortfall that the government first imposed, guess what. That’s the end of cheap medicine as we know it.
It might be fine to argue from a free market perspective, if there actually were a free market in pharmaceuticals.
Most of the drugs which drive prescription costs upward are not sold in a free market, but under government granted monopolies called “patents”. (I remind you all that the first modern patent law was the Statute on Monopolies of 1624, which limited grants of monopolies by the British Crown to new inventions and limited terms, and thus was the basis, along with the Law of Queen Anne on copyright, for our constitutional provision specifying authors and inventors and limited times. The corrupting notion that these monopolies constitute “property” is of relatively recent invention and is pushed chiefly by rent seekers rather than actual innovators.)
Price controls are obnoxious only when inserted into a free market. Thus we do not object that utility rates are subject to price controls, as utilities operate as monopolies. In the case of a life-saving drug with no competing drugs of comparable effectiveness, a patent creates the same circumstance and price controls may actually be warranted.
Yes, I recognize the cost of R&D needs to be supported, and that is why patents are warranted: the Founders thought the same. In cases where it price controls are imposed on newly developed drugs and comparable devices, the developer might be compensated with a longer patent term, or given the choice of accepting price controls and a longer patent term or allowing competitors to produce the drug or device under license and thus introducing price competition directly.
Try as hard as I can, I cannot like the drug companies. Using the Capitalist, Free Market model, it is in their Best Interest to never find a cure. Look for a cure - Yes! - that attracts Grant Money, but actually find a cure - Never! - that would cut off their sales of medications that alleviate symptoms. (Example: really cure the Common Cold and there goes the sale of all those fraudulent ‘cold cure’ medications). Drug sales and marketing reps live very high off the hog, they don’t want to give that up. See the 2002 movie “Phase IV” with Dean Cain.
Re-importation of drugs from Canada will destroy Canada’s preferential pricing overnight.
Let it happen.
Then Canada will have to support Research and Development with the cost of the drugs they use too.
It’s a lie. Canada bargains for the price, and the drug companies accept it. The same drugs by the same manufacturers are also priced far less by those manufacturers in other countries. They’re only propagandizing and trying to make Americans pay for all others. Anti-American, globalist, socialist crooks.