Posted on 08/14/2004 10:39:15 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
The latest effort on John F. Kerry's part emulate Jolly St. Nick involves a really dopey attempt to push more drugs. He wants to reimport them from Canada. Like many policy positions of The So-Called Democratic Party, it sounds really brilliant if you believe in a free lunch. Where it becomes a bad idea, is when it is applied to the real world.
Every year the Canadian Government 'negotiates' with US drug companies to buy a whole bunch of perscription drugs at a much lower price than American consumers pay for them. I put the word negotiate in quotes because the Canadian Governemnt negotiates these prices in much the same manner that the 4th Infantry Division negotiated the surrender of Saddam Hussein to Coalition Forces in Iraq. They intimidate these companies through a simple and aggressive strategy.
The Canadian government tells these companies that they will not respect US drug patents unless they give the Canadians the drugs at price their government deems as fair. Again, on the surface, this appears to be no big deal. It's a very big deal when the process by which a US drug company gets a patent is examined.
The US Government demands extensive research before prescription drugs receive a patent. This process can take as long as twenty years and cost a young fortune in R&D money. The positive result of this process is that US patients can go to a doctor and more likely than not get a safe remedy for most of the things that could possibly ail them.
However, like all with all government regulations, you don't get something for nothing. The drug company has to recover this massive R&D expenditure or go under from the cost. Therefore Americans pay a massive premium on the per pill manufacture costs of most prescription drugs. By conveniently ignoring the research costs associated with curing medical maladies, Kerry makes a slick and nubile case that the average American consumer takes a dishonest hiding from evil drug manufacturers every time we fill our prescriptions.
Thus, he plants the axiom that Christmas arrives a few months early if he can reimport these drugs at Canadian prices and stiff Merck and Pfizer out of their R&D costs. In responses to this buncomb scheme, the drug companies have two options.
a) The companies refuse to sell jack to Canada. This works until Canada rebukes our patents and starts ripping off our chemical formulas to build their own pharmacuetical stocks.
b) American drug companies can stop trying to cure AIDS and cancer and become yet another consortium of industry where the company HQ is a colonial brick building in Delaware and the factories are staffed by workers who speak Spanish or Chinese.
Kerry runs headlong into the paradox of the modern state. Yes, government can take actions that vastly improve the lot of the common man. No, government cannot take those actions free of cost. Somebody has to pay the cost of developing safe and effective 'miracle drugs'. Exacerbating the free rider problem created by the machinations of Canadian bureaucrats will only cause irreperable damage to America's scientific community.
John F. Kerry is a profoundly intelligent man with a broad range of governmental experience. In other words, he's not stupid on this issue, he's blatantly dishonest. Far too dishonest to be classified as anything other than unfit for command.
The US pharmaceutical industry sells to every socialist system at the margin, while charging the US consumer the fully loaded cost. They absolutely have every right to do so, but it's not a good long term strategy for an industry which purports to desire a free market.
If a manufacturer will sell in bulk to buyer A at $10, but will sell to small-quantity buyer B for no less than $40, it's perfectly appropriate for A, if he can set up a distribution mechanism, to sell to B at $15. Adam Smith would certainly approve.
And the fact that A is in Canada is irrelevant. The drug industry, by permitting the Canadian socialist system to benefit from R&D paid for by American taxpayers and consumers at essentially zero cost to Canada, has forfeited any loyalty owed it by the American consumer.
Many of the drugs do more harm than good.
You got that right. I can go on and on. My bitterness is so great, I am afraid to go to any doctor or take any drug. Today's medical doctors are nothing but licensed drug pushers. They know nothing about healing. They have brought my family much misery.
"The history of liberalism is the history of substituting what sounds good for what works."--William F. Buckley (I think)
You have it right:
Re-import, until the practice of caving in to buyers' cartels breaks down.
Amen to that-no drugs in this house either, nor trips to doctors except in the event of broken bones or injuries requiring stitches. No processed, pre-cooked or junk food, either-everything is cooked from scratch and Atkins friendly. America is becoming a nation of legal drug addicts who think drugs will fix everything and make them live forever-I think if people have to buy their own insurance and continue to pay for drugs, this attitude will go away eventually, but that's just my opinion.
A problem we're going through now is that many years ago, a doctor, (probably well intentioned) put my mom on Serax.
She is a full-blown addict and in order to deal with the side effects another doctor has put her on four more drugs.
This is just my mom. I can go on to other family members in similar fixes.
It pains me to see doctors put all these kids on drugs.
Ah, I sympathize with you-one of my best friends who is grossly overweight was put on two different blood pressure medications, which made him impotent and depressed, and diet pills which made him crazy, so he went on antidepressants and viagra which made him act like a horny, crazy zombie, according to his wife. He finally went to a dietician who showed him how to lose the weight with willpower and proper diet, dropped the drugs and now he is back to normal. It saddens me that parents are letting their children be fed dangerous drugs to keep them quiet in class-this can only do terrible harm-insurance companies really need to stop funding this madness.
The other day I told my sister that there isn't one thing wrong with our mother that drugs hasn't caused.
She's been in hospitals three times within the past two or three months. Last week was bleeding ulcers. She needed 4 pints blood.
A year and half ago, a really nice doctor (ugh!) did my mom a really big favor and removed her breast because they found a spot on mammogram. Why are they doing mammograms on 87 year old women? She would probably never have died of breast cancer. But she went back last Dec. for another mammogram. I suppose this Dec. she'll want to go back again.
Good grief! My prayers for your mother-it is a pity that she can't be weaned off all that stuff before more harm results. Did she truly have such a bad anxiety disorder that she was prescribed such an addictive drug with so many potentially serious side effects?
The passion for painful and even invasive "preventive tests" is all about insurance co-pay-and some insurance companies are closing their wallets and telling their customers not to go there, finally. I read recently that some doctors are saying that mammograms do more harm than good-they can injure tissue and rupture small lumps, causing them to spread where they might never have done so. I've never had one and never will-no "harmless" thing should cause pain and trauma to the body-if it does, it isn't harmless. Likewise, I did not touch HRT when everyone was hyping it-it just didn't seem healthy to me to re-start a process that nature shuts down at a certain age-God presumably knows what he is doing. Now, indeed HRT is shown to be not only useless for "protecting" women, but to be downright harmful. Herbs work just fine for menopause, in any case.
Recently I read a statistic that stated that cancer patients were living longer between the time of diagnoses and death. What a joke!! That only means that earlier diagnosis is making the medical profession look like they're able to treat cancer. There's no proof they do.
My grandmother died of breast cancer, somewhere around age 80. She lived seven years after she told her family she had a lump. She was never treated in any way. How can the medical profession claim their treatments prolong life if they don't have any idea how long someone would live without any treatment?
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