Commentary: Coercive "Negotiation"

"The below article unfortunately misses all of the moral issues
underlying the attack on prescription drug makers, basing its
argument entirely on practical concerns.

But it does a good job of unmasking price "negotiations" -- a
favorite for state-level government initiatives -- as indirect
coercion, and it identifies foreign price controls (which these
proposals emulate) as a "free ride" that increases US drug prices."

-Robert Tracinski, Editor, TIADaily.com
www.TIADaily.com\

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http://tinyurl.com/6omx5

"Call 'Negotiated' Drug Prices What They Really Are: Price Controls,"
Benjamin Zycher, LA Times, January 21

"Advocates of cheaper drug prices like to talk about
federal 'negotiation' of prices with pharmaceutical companies. And
when they do, they almost always point to the Department of Veterans
Affairs, which they say has used its size to 'bargain' for better
deals on prices for years.

Why, they want to know, can't Medicare do the same thing?

But Feinstein and her colleagues know full well that
although 'negotiation' has a nice ring to it, that's not really what
is going on.

What's actually happening is something that does not sound quite as
appealing: price controls....

Here is something more effective that Congress could be doing to
reform pharmaceutical pricing: policies must be developed to end the
free ride that foreign pharmaceutical consumers-- particularly in
wealthy economies like those of Canada and Europe-- now receive.

Consumers in these countries pay artificially low prices because of
foreign price controls, forcing Americans to pay higher prices to
support R&D."

< It should be clear that prices forcibly "negotiated" by a
government monopoly controlling Medicare/ Medicaid, or by a local
managed care monopoly is an equally coercive form of price controls,
with similar consequences. >

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