Suitably Flip

E'wardsonomics: The Journey To Affordability Begins With Trampling the Free Market

It must be exhausting spending your days trying to cram such naked illogic into voters' heads.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards wants to reduce the cost of U.S. health care by removing patents for breakthrough drugs and requiring health insurance companies to spend at least 85 percent of their premiums on patient care.

A trial lawyer likely has a somewhat easier time suspending reason in support of a policy that seeks to drub the pioneering healthcare researchers and drug developers he's spent his career fleecing, but the thunderous fatuity of this idea would seem to needle the common sense of even the most mildly sentient creature.

It's a classic example of the 2nd most common left wing economic fallacy - failing to consider any but the most immediate consequences (the most common of course being the failure to recognize that changes in tax policy yield changes in economic behavior).

Eliminate patents on blockbuster drugs and, yes indeed, drug prices will quickly plummet as every pricey pharmaceutical on the market will be open to generic competition.  Citizens, rejoice - the era of cheap healthcare has arrived.  And Mr. E'wards dearly hopes we adopt his short-sightedness and accept that the chain of causality ends there.

The impudently rational, however, will quickly realize that the next thing to plummet is the share price of Pfizer, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Eli Lilly, Wyeth, and every other innovator of life-saving medical breakthroughs (not to mention the value of the millions of pension funds and 401k's invested in them).  By drastically diminishing the profitability of any future blockbuster drugs, Mr. E'wards' plan deftly prevents an untold number of future pharmaceutical breakthroughs, thus saving our children from the headache of grappling with how to pay for them.

His second tenet - empowering government to decide how insurance companies spend their money - is no better.  It's symptomatic of a knee-jerk presumption of the unflinching evilness of private enterprise that is so hard-wired, it engenders the kind of inherently flawed logic that government is better at making economic decisions than the free market.

I have no doubt that the folly of this plan will pale in comparison once we get a complete look at Hillarycare Redux, but for now, Johnny Coiffeur seems to have won the booby prize.

Comments

E'wardsonomics: The Journey To Affordability Begins With Trampling the Free Market

It must be exhausting spending your days trying to cram such naked illogic into voters' heads.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards wants to reduce the cost of U.S. health care by removing patents for breakthrough drugs and requiring health insurance companies to spend at least 85 percent of their premiums on patient care.

A trial lawyer likely has a somewhat easier time suspending reason in support of a policy that seeks to drub the pioneering healthcare researchers and drug developers he's spent his career fleecing, but the thunderous fatuity of this idea would seem to needle the common sense of even the most mildly sentient creature.

It's a classic example of the 2nd most common left wing economic fallacy - failing to consider any but the most immediate consequences (the most common of course being the failure to recognize that changes in tax policy yield changes in economic behavior).

Eliminate patents on blockbuster drugs and, yes indeed, drug prices will quickly plummet as every pricey pharmaceutical on the market will be open to generic competition.  Citizens, rejoice - the era of cheap healthcare has arrived.  And Mr. E'wards dearly hopes we adopt his short-sightedness and accept that the chain of causality ends there.

The impudently rational, however, will quickly realize that the next thing to plummet is the share price of Pfizer, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Eli Lilly, Wyeth, and every other innovator of life-saving medical breakthroughs (not to mention the value of the millions of pension funds and 401k's invested in them).  By drastically diminishing the profitability of any future blockbuster drugs, Mr. E'wards' plan deftly prevents an untold number of future pharmaceutical breakthroughs, thus saving our children from the headache of grappling with how to pay for them.

His second tenet - empowering government to decide how insurance companies spend their money - is no better.  It's symptomatic of a knee-jerk presumption of the unflinching evilness of private enterprise that is so hard-wired, it engenders the kind of inherently flawed logic that government is better at making economic decisions than the free market.

I have no doubt that the folly of this plan will pale in comparison once we get a complete look at Hillarycare Redux, but for now, Johnny Coiffeur seems to have won the booby prize.