Straight Talk on Drug Reimportation

George Will writes:

...was it unreasonable for Kerry to think McCain might be comfortable on a Democratic ticket? Not really.

In ABC's New Hampshire debate, McCain said: "Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?" A conservative's answer is:

That amounts to importing Canada's price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others -- new pain-relieving, life-extending pharmaceuticals -- would be unavailable. Setting drug prices by government fiat rather than market forces results in huge reductions of funding for research and development of new drugs. McCain's evident aim is to reduce pharmaceutical companies' profits. But if all those profits were subtracted from the nation's health care bill, the pharmaceutical component of that bill would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent -- and innovation would stop, taking a terrible toll in unnecessary suffering and premature death. When McCain explains that trade-off to voters, he will actually have engaged in straight talk.

There are decent, intelligent people who believe that equity or efficiency or both are often served by government setting prices. In America, such people are called Democrats.

I would replace "intelligent" with "misguided" or "short-sighted", but the point stands.

Mitt Romney's Bizarre Hospital

Mitt Romney said something odd at one of the recent Republican presidential debates (at St. Anselm College, NH). I wondered if I had imagined it, but there's a transcript.

Challenged by Fred Thompson on his health insurance mandates in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney had this to say:

Yes, we said, look, if people can afford to buy it, either buy the insurance or pay your own way; don't be free-riders and pass on the cost to your health care to everybody else...

If somebody is making, let's say $100,000 a year, and doesn't have health insurance, and they show up at the hospital, and they need a $1,000 repair of some kind for something that's gone wrong. And they say, "Look, I'm not insured, I'm not going to pay." Do you think they should pay or not?

Is this a problem in Massachusetts? Do people making $100,000 a year go into hospitals, receive treatment, refuse to pay, and get bailed out by the state? No wonder Massachusetts is in such bad shape. They're going to have problems funding health care if they don't bother to send a bill or pursue non-payers with the wide range of available remedies.

His hypothetical $100k free-rider doesn't pass the laugh test, suggesting, oddly enough, that multi-millionaire Mitt Romney tried to "out-poor" Fred Thompson.

Mark Steyn on the "Uninsured"

Mark Steyn reminds us why reality and math guarantee that most politician-annointed crises aren't crises at all:

...out of 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million aren't American, 9 million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population.

Read it all here.

Senate Considers Price Controls

The Macaca Post reports:

Ignoring a White House veto threat, [Senate] lawmakers voted 63 to 28 to move to a final vote on adding the drug importation provision to a larger bill on the operations of the Food and Drug Administration.

"There is a pricing problem with prescription drugs," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who co-sponsored the amendment with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). "The identical drug, FDA-approved, the same pill, put in the same bottle, made by the same company, is set virtually every other place in the world at a lower price. And the American consumer is told, 'You know what, we have a special deal for you: You get to pay the highest price in the world.'"

"The rest of the world" imposes price controls that the Senators are too cowardly to directly consider.

Earlier this week, the White House issued a statement saying that Bush's advisers would recommend that he veto any importation provision that did not address safety concerns around imported drugs that were identified by a Department of Health and Human Services task force in 2004.

...

"The administration believes that allowing the importation of drugs outside the current safety system established by the FDA without addressing these serious safety concerns would threaten public health and result in unsafe, unapproved and counterfeit drugs being imported into the United States," the White House statement said.

Despite support in the House and Senate, the White House for years has blocked legislation opening the borders to the reimportation of U.S.-made pharmaceuticals, arguing that their safety cannot be assured. During the Clinton administration, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala similarly concluded that she could not guarantee a safe system for drug imports.

For related background on how Congress and the Democrats want to mismanage American health care, check out Democrats Want Old People to Die.