Nancy, Please Leave Part D Alone

Sometimes when my friends get together, one or more of them starts complaining about drug prices and the evil ways of the American drug companies. I always have to laugh at how incongruous this all is because, at their ages, most of the complainers would be dead if it were not for the products of these terrible drug companies.

Although the federal government provides some seed money for basic research through the National Institute of Health, most of the money, about a billion dollars for each major drug, comes from the drug companies and their investors, and I am not talking about drugs for the sniffles, as some liberals like to sneer. I am talking about drugs that control high blood pressure, reduce bad cholesterol, dissolve clots causing heart attacks and cure some types of leukemia.

Now along comes Nancy Pelosi on a mission to have the federal government negotiate drug prices for Medicare recipients – a sure winner politically to gain votes from ignorant and naïve voters. She cites the program of the Veterans Administration, which does negotiate drug prices. Of course, she only mentions the lower prices; she doesn’t mention the limited number of drugs available to VA members (1400 vs. 4300 for Medicare Part D), nor does she mention that VA members have no access to any of the newer drugs according to a study by the General Accounting Office.

And most of all, she never mentions what two independent researchers have concluded would happen to the development of future wonder drugs if the federal government gets involved in setting prices: that approximately 200 new drugs over the next 20 years will never be developed for our children and our grandchildren. We would be robbing the next generation with our selfishness, while simultaneously reducing the number of drugs available to us now. This is not mere alarmism; both Canada and Europe are already experiencing a decline in the development of new drugs.