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The Republican Drug Plan: A Prescription for Less Freedom and Higher Costs
By Richard E. Ralston
July 3, 2003
The Bush Administration and Congressional
Republicans are advocating new drug benefit plans that will replace
free choice with government controls. Instead of making their own
decisions about the best medications, patients and their doctors
will be reduced to seeking permission to use what the government
decides to provide. This can only result in what government supplied
health care has always produced in the U.S. and elsewhere:
shortages, rationing, waiting lists, higher taxes, lower quality,
less research and fewer new drugs.
House and Senate Republicans have approved plans
last that would provide prescription drugs at a cost of $400 billion
over 10 years. The stated reason for the plan is to provide
Americans with medicines they could not otherwise afford. The
Republicans don’t ask why drugs are out of the reach of so many
customers. They merely proceed on the immoral premise that everyone
has a right to medicine, which entails that some people have a
“right” to force other people to supply them with drugs. Citizens
who think that they should not be responsible for paying for their
own prescription drugs will find, after these proposals become law,
that they are now responsible for paying for everyone else’s
prescription drugs.
Higher costs will be the result of
enacting these prescription drug plans, based on the established
track record of government involvement with health care:
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Foreign government experience: Government
provided health care in other countries has not been able to
deliver more and better health care. On December 1 the Sunday
Times of London reported: “Labour has poured billions into
health care since coming to power and has pledged 40 billion
pounds more over the next three years. But the [National Health
Service] is a greedy dinosaur of a service that swallows all the
funds it is fed without demonstrating any increase in output.” One
example cited was that after spending an additional 280 million
pounds on cancer treatment beginning in the year 2000, two-thirds
of newly diagnosed cancer victims still have to wait over a month
for radiotherapy to begin. But such failures are irrelevant to
governments driven by the principle that those who are able to
produce things of great value have a duty to provide those things
to anyone who wants them. On November 29 the Financial Times
reported on a Canadian government proposal for a huge new infusion
of government cash due to growing concerns about the quality of
health care and lengthening waiting lists for treatment.
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The American experience is no better. Medicare,
which cost $3 billion a year in 1967 costs $250 billion today and,
according to the Congressional Budget Office, will cost $474
billion a year by 2012 without any new prescription
benefits.
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Government inability to control any expenses:
NASA sold the International Space Station to Congress in the early
1980’s at a projected cost of $8 billion. So far the bill is $100
billion, and it’s not finished yet. The idea that government
involvement will reduce the cost of the development of anything as
complicated and high-tech as life-saving drugs is ludicrous. The
government, as Americans well know, cannot even control the
cost of postage.
Rather than reduce the cost of drugs, like all
government medical plans the new program will just add more of the
poison that created the disease. Rigid controls and the vast
bureaucracies of Medicare and the FDA already add billions of
dollars to the cost of drugs. This, not the market place, is
responsible for the current high cost of drugs. New government
programs and “benefits” will further explode drug costs and result
in rationing, restrictions, regulations, less research, and fewer
drugs. Adding yet more federal bureaucracy to administer another
program will just layer on more expense.
Fewer choices and less freedom for
patients will be another primary result of these plans. If the
Republican plan forces more Americans into “managed” care it will
eliminate free choice for more than just prescription drugs. It will
reduce all of the health care options for those who take this route.
Fewer new drugs will become available as a
consequence of these plans. When the government is “surprised” after
the escalation in drug costs that result from a plan that promises
to pay all of the bills, it will inevitably proceed to price
controls and other new restrictions on drug companies. These
additional controls on price will create uncertainty and destroy
market incentives needed by the pharmaceutical companies to
undertake the huge investments and risks need to develop new and
better drugs. Drugs that never come into existence will not be too
expensive to buy, but the result will be a price in unrelieved pain
and uncured diseases. The wonders and break-throughs achieved in
recent decades by America’s pharmaceutical industry will gradually
become a thing of the past.
If the government really cares about the cost of
drugs, it can stop taxing the dollars that citizens spend on their
own health care costs and open the door to unrestricted medical
savings accounts (MSAs). Citizens spending their own dollars on
medications will always spend them more wisely and prudently than
the government.
If the government really cares about the
availability of medicine, it can start decreasing rather than
increasing controls over the pharmaceutical industry. What the
government really needs to expand is not government, but freedom: a
free market that encourages drug companies to develop competing new
drugs. Free markets and MSAs will provide patients and physicians
with better drugs at a more reasonable cost than the heavy hand of
government.
When offered this new “benefit,” Americans
concerned about the cost of drugs and their own health need to
reply: No thanks.
Richard E. Ralston is Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.
Copyright © 2003 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
For reprint permission, contact AFCM.
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