Wednesday, January 30, 2008

An ongoing theme

A lot of people in my comment threads on pharma are saying "Well, okay, maybe if we forced the drug prices so far down, that would kill off innovation. But it's not fair that Europe is free riding. We need to find some way to force them to Pay Their Fair Share." Interestingly, many of them seem to be conservatives, the same people who applaud when I say, in re other policy issues, that the fact that there is a problem does not automatically imply that there is also a solution.
It's almost as if they agree with you for purely ideological reasons, eh Megan?
Truth is, I don't give a damn about what Megan has to say to conservatives about the horrible evil of Europeans not paying American corporations for the privilege of healing and saving lives, but there's a couple howlers in the post to deal with before we get to her response to us dirty fucking hippies and our hatred of money. First, this
No one who is a serious policy wonk on this stuff has any sort of workable proposal whereby America persuades Europe to pay more for its drugs. [my emphasis]
This is because they're too busy reading Liberal Fascism and writing fanboy letters to Doughbob. So we see that LibFasc actively hurts America, by denying multinational corporations the full amount of money they could make.
Then there's this
As anyone, including me, who is taking a newly invented drug will tell you, we're getting pretty good value for money. (And if you're not getting good value for money, you can just not take the drug! Problem solved.)
And if you can't afford the drug, you just might already be dead! Problem solved.

Back with part 2 in a few...

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