When was the last time Democrats lowered the cost of… anything?
Obamacare comes to mind.
Seven years ago, congressional Democrats promised that forcing people to buy health insurance would lower the cost of medical care. Instead, both the cost of insurance and medical care have skyrocketed. Many people’s premiums have more than doubled in cost. Others have discovered that while they may be “covered” under Obamacare, getting care is another thing.
No surprise there — or shouldn’t have been.
The fundamental purpose of insurance is to spread out the cost of unanticipated and unusual expenses – not to cover every little routine medical expense, such as physicals and the sniffles.
Imagine if you used your car insurance coverage to pay for oil changes, windshield wiper fluid top-offs and tire rotations.
Do you suppose the cost of “caring” for your car would go down… or up?
This is the model for the Not So Affordable Care Act (the formal name for Obamacare) which among other economic imbecilities outlawed catastrophic care policies – which had high deductibles but very low premiums, based on the fact that the policies covered potentially very expensive but also not-routine health problems, such as heart attacks and cancer.
Just like your car insurance, these policies didn’t “cover” everything – just the big stuff. Policyholder paid out of pocket for routine stuff – which they could afford because they weren’t drowning in insurance costs.
That is what insurance is supposed to be — and which Obamacare isn’t. What it is is a medical treatment entitlement — the Lure of Free. Which always costs.
Now the same peddlers of the not-so-free lunch are promising to lower the cost of prescription drugs by allowing their importation from Mexico and other Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) countries via legislation (S. 771) titled the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act. The sponsors of the bill include Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Al Franken – two of the Senate’s most liberal Big Spending members – along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s only openly socialist member.
That alone ought to tell you something about how “free” all of this is going to be.
As always with the promise of “free,” it sounds superficially appealing. Drugs do cost less south of the border. That’s the worm on the hook. But does anyone bother to ask why this is so?
It’s actually not that drugs are less expensive to hecho en Mexico. It’s that they are very, very expensive to hecho here. Everything from the physical buildings in which new drugs are researched (OSHA, EPA) to the compliance and regulatory costs imposed on their manufacture and sale (FDA) has become exorbitantly expensive. These costs are reflected in the end-cost you pay for the drugs, whenever you finally get them.
Republicans aren’t excluded from blame here, but the Democrats must accept the lion’s share because they never seem to object to any regulation, regardless of its costs.
But instead of doing something about that here, Warren and Franken seem to think the solution is to import finished products from another country – like Mexico – not subject to the regulatory apparat they erected here.
It’s exactly like dealing with the problem of cars being ever-more-expensive to manufacturer in the United States because of regulatory compliance costs by manufacturing them in Mexico – and then shipping the finished cars back across the border.
But has this made cars hecho’d in Mexico cheaper?
No. What it has done is un-employ large numbers of American workers for the sake of Mexican workers. What the Democrats are proposing with regard to prescription drugs would have exactly the same effect. Why not just lower the cost of doing business here, in the U.S.?
This never seems to occur to the Warrens and Frankens of the Senate. Much less to Sanders. They live in the pleasant world of the no-cost-lunch, where hoagies and sodas magically appear on their plates – and the bill never comes. And it’s not just hecho, either.
One of the reasons drug costs less to buy in Mexico is because you don’t have to jump through so many government hoops to get them. You can go into any pharmacia and buy what you need without having to get a permission slip from the government first.
There is much less regulation of the sale of prescription drugs in Mexico.
But Warren/Franken/Sanders’ bill isn’t going to allow that here. They are only talking about importing them from Mexico. Not about cutting back any of the current regulatory rigmarole. You’d still be forced to jump through all the usual hoops – including the ACA’s hoops, which they’re not going to let anyone opt-out of. How is this going to lower costs, exactly? They have no answer.
Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act isn’t about lowering the cost of anything. It is about increasing the government’s control over everything.
The Democrats, gloating over the GOP’s fumbled attempt to repeal Obamacare, are hoping to strike while their iron is hot, further cementing the government’s micromanagement of health care generally — not just over prescription drugs. They are hoping to consolidate Obamacare before Republicans can regroup and repeal the mess, as they promised to do
Stopping this bill would be a first step toward getting back on track.