[IMC-Editorial] Republicans Prescribe Less Freedom and Higher Costs

[Americans for Free Choice in Medicine]

July 7, 2003

Contact: Richard E. Ralston, Executive Director
Mobile Tel: (949) 500-6829
E-Mail: richard at afcm.org

The Republican Drug Plan: A Prescription for Less Freedom and Higher Costs

by Richard E. Ralston

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 (MSA). 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 MSA's 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.

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Richard E. Ralston is Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in
Medicine.

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Americans for Free Choice In Medicine (AFCM)
http://www.afcm.org
1525 Superior Avenue, Suite 101
Newport Beach, CA 92663
E-Mail: press at afcm.org

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