Posted on 12/17/2021 5:24:55 AM PST by Kaslin
Right before Thanksgiving Day, House Democrats passed Build Back Better, one of the most misguided and ill-timed bills in the history of congressional legislation.
At a time when an average of 1,300 Americans a day are dying from Covid-19 and tens of millions are battling chronic diseases from cancer to diabetes, the bill would discourage the development of lifesaving drugs. America's seniors will suffer the most as medicine cabinets soon turn distressingly bare.
Build Back Better would set drug reimbursements far below the market-based prices that Medicare, the nation's largest insurance program, currently pays. Cheaper drugs sound great, in theory. And who could possibly object to seniors paying less for their prescriptions?
Yet if only things were that simple. While the need for lower drug prices is urgent, those prices must be the result of market-based policies that don't disrupt research and development into new treatments.
Our lawmakers appear not to have thought through the inevitable consequences of their intended measures.
If the federal government intervenes in the market and prevents biotech companies from earning a fair return, then the investors backing those capital-intensive firms will steer their money elsewhere. As a result, promising treatments will wither on the vine, perhaps never even making it out of the lab due to a lack of funding.
An analogy might prove illustrative. Imagine if the government arbitrarily declared that restaurants can't charge more than $2 for cheeseburgers and 25 cents for fries. People might initially rejoice at the prospect of cheaper meals -- but pretty soon, they'd notice that restaurants had taken that option off the menu, or reduced the size of formerly half-pound burgers to tiny sliders. As for the fries …
How many drugs would never reach patients as a result of legislation that does something pretty similar to a slew of medications?
Estimates vary. Economists at the University of Chicago who analyzed an earlier version of Democrats' bill projected it would "lead to a 29 to 60 percent reduction in R&D from 2021 to 2039 which translates into 167 to 342 fewer new drug approvals during that period."
Although the price controls in Build Back Better aren't quite as comprehensive as that eye-watering earlier version, they would eventually apply to 100 drugs, instead of up to 250.
But the impact would still be enormous. The Congressional Budget Office projects the price controls will save the government about $160 billion over a decade. That's $160 billion that biotech companies won't have available to spend on research.
Given that it takes about $3 billion, on average, to bring each new drug to market, it's clear that Democrats' bill would stifle the development of dozens of medicines. America's seniors would lose out on potential treatments, or even cures, for Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, various cancers, and other ailments.
Equally crucial to note is the potential impact these new curbs on research and development could have on our ability to react defensively when the next pandemic hits. The vaccines for Covid-19 may have appeared to hit the market -- and our bloodstreams -- in record time. The pandemic began in January 2020, and Americans were receiving their first jabs less than 12 months later. But let's not forget the clinical backstory for these vaccinations, and the years of costly research that were banked in order for our scientists to be ready to move when Covid crashed down on us.
If the drug-pricing provisions in Build Back Better had been in place a few years earlier, it is very unlikely that we would have been able to fight the coronavirus the way we can now.
And to add insult to injury, the savings from the price controls won't even benefit seniors. Democrats have already earmarked that money to help offset Build Back Better's bonanza of social-welfare spending. The money saved by raiding seniors' medicine cabinets will instead be spent on subsidizing electric vehicles and their charging stations, and on tax breaks to blue-state coastal millionaires.
Build Back Better is a disaster for seniors. It will impede scientists' ability to create lifesaving drugs. We can only hope the legislation fails in the Senate.
Thanks....more clear than anything else I’ve read on the subject.
~The Law of Not Stupid
Free market solutions? Bah! Who needs that when smart government planners are making efficient solutions and avoiding the inefficiencies of competition that capitalism always brings? Didn’t the old Soviet Union provide vodka at a cheaper price than safe drinking water? What’s more important?
Yeah, we probably would have been stuck using monoclonals and Ivermectin, and a lot more people would still be alive.
Onward glorious communist revolution, comrades! Down with running dog capitalists and their counter-revolutionary lackeys.
I am so SICK of being told that all of the Left's policies and programs are just some kind of misguided or ill-informed accident, when it's beyond obvious that their intent is to slit our collective throats.
“If the federal government intervenes in the market and prevents biotech companies from earning a fair return,”
1) What is a fair profit? 10%, 50%, 100%?
2) How much do Big Pharma and the biotech companies benefit from the billions of dollars the federal government pays in the form of direct subsidies to them for the development of products (i.e. Covid vaccines) and indirect subsidies in the form of research grants to universities?
3) Consider the fact for decades U.S. citizens have paid the highest drug prices in the world because the pharmaceutical companies amortize their R&D costs against the products sold inside the US which allows them to charge lower prices in other nations? Is it “fair” US consumer should pay more for the drugs they purchase, particularly when the US taxpayer is subsidizing the industry?
4) Is the compensation for the senior executives at Pfizer “fair” and reasonable. Per the most recent proxy statement the total direct compensation for the CEO of Pfizer in 2020 was $21 million. Total direct compensation for the top 5 executives at Pfizer was nearly $60 million. How much of that is due to the windfall of billions of government spending for Covid vaccine development and purchases of Covid vaccines for the population?
Please don’t infer I’m a socialist who wants government to dictate compensation and profitability to the pharmaceutical industry. However, I’m sick of big multinational corporations gladly receiving billions in subsidies, tax breaks, R&D subsidies, federal purchases and other direct and indirect benefits and then whine about government “intervention” in their markets. Many of the subsidies, tax breaks, R&D subsidies, and purchases occur because these companies spend millions lobbying Congress and paying off regulators by hiring them when they retire from the government.
Covid has exposed the cosy relationship between the FDA, NIH, CDC and the big corporations making billions off the citizens of the United States. There have been numerous threads on this forum about the federal government and the big medical corporations. Read Robert Kennedy Junior’s book about Fauci for more of the nauseating details.
Perhaps the real reason there isn’t a free market in medical care is because the big medical corporations have lobbied Congress and the bureaucracy to keep a free market from flourishing.
With leftists and progressives, it’s always the number one on their agenda...Getting rid of people...Population control is the idea they embrace,nio matter what laws they pass.....
As part of the Great Replacement, dems need to get rid of those old people. Covid helped, but not enough. There are still too many pesky old, mostly White, people around.
With biden helping, they will get on with the job of replacing the old Whiteys with new faces.
Conservatives need to quit being so naive and admit that we're dealing with the evil of communism on a grand scale. It's a leaderless communist revolution. There is no Mao or Stalin. There are thousands of them.
This is sick.
Dems are also targeting the young by indoctrinating them from a young age through evil teachers who are full zombies following the Dem montras without any thought to what is right.
Bingo!
This legislation is merely a squabble between thieves (Big Pharma vs Big Government) over how to split the loot obtained from ripping off patients with monopoly-priced medicines.
Pharmaceutical companies spend much more on lobbying and marketing expenses (and outright bribery to legislators) than they ever spend on research and development of products. It gives them a better return on their investment.
I have no sympathy for them or the Governments they rent. Enforcement of existing 100-year-old laws would put most of the executives and regulators in jail.
Let's do that. After the first few cases, watch medical prices drop by 80% for the same stuff we get now. And we will get better quality stuff later. That is what genuine free markets do, as opposed to the pretenses we have today.
“such hats do not go well with the balaclavas and face coverings of the Antifa/BLM thug armies”
LOL...yep, that’s GOT to be it.
Full disclosure...I swiped that tagline from a FReeper’s comment a few days ago. I told him that his comment would make a great tagline and I was right! It is good, isn’t it?
Build Back Better’s bonanza of social-welfare spending.
The 2 million illegals give a sigh or relief and vote.
Two million? More like 30 million illegals. Even the government was admitting to 11 million fifteen years ago. Between the Democrats, various church based groups hell bent on flooding the country with welfare parasites, NGOs with the sole aim of importing enough third world mouths to turn the USA into Somalia we’re lucky it isn’t 50 million ( if it isn’t)
Agree I counted the Biden invasion numbers only millions more on the march and no end in sight.
The Marxists are in full steam ahead to change the country they have the aid of the swamp media and a hell of a lot of crazy people.
“Let’s do that. After the first few cases, watch medical prices drop by 80% for the same stuff we get now. “
We need to begin enforcing anti-trust law in every industry and break up the oligopolies of today with the laws used to bust the 19th century trusts. Capitalism thrives when there are many competitors, not a few. When there are many competitors:
1) prices decline as aggressive competition forces efficiencies
2) innovation flourishes. Company innovate to develop an edge other than price versus their competition.
3) consumers have more choice
4) often more people are employed. If there are 50 companies in an industry versus only 2-3 big corporations, more people are employed. After all what is the first thing that happens in a corporate merger? Downsizing of payroll.
5) capital investment flows to innovation.
6) smaller companies can’t afford to pay $20 million per year to CEO’s (like Pfizer) so the market forces more equitable distribution of wealth.
7) Regular employee wages rise. More companies means more opportunities for talented employees in an industry.
In the medical field break up big pharma, big insurance, big hospital chains, big equipment manufacturers. Consumers, employees, and the economy will benefit from restoring market capitalism.
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