Of Politics and Pills

Opinion Journal ^ | 03 Dec 06 | Robert L. Pollack

[rellimpank]

Eli Lilly's CEO warns that bad policies may imperil pharmaceutical research.

NEW YORK--Is the future of your health riding on what happens in Washington? Sidney Taurel thinks it might be. The Eli Lilly CEO ticks off a list of former "death sentences" being cured or turned into chronic conditions--"AIDS, leukemia, Hodgkin's, hopefully solid tumors within the next few years. The potential for medical research is unlimited. We just need to make sure we don't interdict it by the wrong policies."

And what might those "wrong policies" be? Anything, it would appear, that reduces the financial incentives for drug companies to invest in research and development. Mr. Taurel points without hesitation to the mere threat of HillaryCare in the early 1990s as an episode that reduced investment in R&D, as drug makers, including his own, redirected money toward the purchase of pharmacy benefit management companies. As another example, he offers the anti-drug-industry crusade of Sen. Estes Kefauver in the late 1950s and early '60s:

[rellimpank]

--a warning to the Demotraitors from a rep of the "evil" drug companies--whose exploitation of modern chemistry has helped to increase the average lifespan by thirty years or so in the last century---

[Zenith]

IMPORTANT

BARACK OBAMA HAS A MIDDLE NAME ITS

HUSSEIN

[SmartAZ]

The problem is not policy, the problem is insurance. Just the fact that somebody else pays the bills twists everything.

[ClaireSolt]

It isa their success that they hate. Like giant bullies beating uop on a smart kid.