Price Controls on Pharmaceuticals are Impractical and Immoral
Monday August 9, 2004


"Price controls on pharmaceuticals will be a disaster to medical
research in America, said Dr. Andrew Bernstein, senior writer for the
Ayn Rand Institute.

"Price controls, by reducing or eliminating profit margins, will
leave pharmaceutical and biotech firms with less capital and
incentive to invest in expensive research and development of new
drugs. Price controls in any field," observed Bernstein, "necessarily
lead to a diminished supply of goods and services in that field."

"In the past decade, for example, price controls in Europe have
caused biotech investment there to fall precipitously--from $6
billion to $2 billion--and led to a significant drop in the
development of innovative drugs. Do we want the same to happen in
America, where current investment on developing drugs is $16 billion?"

"The reason price controls are impractical," Bernstein explained, "is
that they are immoral. In this particular case, they forcibly prevent
producers of life-promoting goods and services from gaining the
financial rewards they have so abundantly earned. What policy could
be more unjust than one penalizing the innovators who, literally,
keep us alive?"

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Dr. Andrew Bernstein, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, is
available for interviews.
Contact larryb@... or (800) 365-6552 ext. 213.

For more articles on health care like this, go to:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_topic_healthcare