Drug Companies Charge US Patients More Every Year; in other Countries, Prices Go Down.

There’s a story in the Sunday  New York Times about drug prices that exposes a conspiracy among companies to charge patients in the United States more every year, with the help of the US government.  The drug industry spends $250 million a year on lobbying, more than any other industry.  The benefits from this lobbying are huge: most government agencies are completely blind to prices.  Even the agency that studies drug effectiveness doesn’t consider cost as a part of the equation.  The “Affordable Care Act” doesn’t do anything to control drug costs, although 10 percent of medical expenses are for drugs.  That’s $270 billion a year, out of $2.7 trillion total.  Last year, costs went up 25% overall.

The worst shame of the medical industry is that the drug companies are only doing what every other profit-making entity in medicine is doing: fleecing the public for all that they will bear, and more.  This is reflected in the fact that the majority of personal bankruptcies mention medical debt as an important, or the most important, cause of the bankruptcy petition.  Fifteen percent of the American public lives dangerously, without insurance of any kind.  For these people, the primary resort to treatment is the emergency room, barred by law from turning patients away, but more expensive than any other form of medicine.

Other countries have stringent controls on drug prices.  Of course, other countries have national health care plans as well.  Only the United States forces its citizens to pay inflated prices, even if they are insured.   The reason for for this cost is simple: through lobbying, the drug companies have established close connections with our lawmakers that allow them to dictate policy and charge whatever the market will bear.

Here is a link to the NYT article, if you would like to read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/the-soaring-cost-of-a-simple-breath.html?hpw

I’m not going to bore you with tedious reflections upon the government shutdown and potential default on the public debt.  The only thing I have to say is that this is the most obvious example yet of the Republican tendency towards anti-reality orientation.   They believe, despite public opinion polls, that they are doing the will of the public, when in fact they are doing something the vast majority of Americans don’t want them to do.  Being against evolution and against government stimulus to revive the economy, it is only consistent that they should be against paying for programs that they have already voted into law ( the debt limit debate) or honoring the securities that America sold to finance the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the bank bailout (the primary components of our currently 17 trillion dollar total debt, to which service ten percent of the yearly budget of the federal government is devoted.)  (I’m quoting the debt numbers because, in fact, the debt is manageable at only ten percent of the budget, and to point out that the yearly shortfall has been dropping every year that Obama has been president, and that over half of our total debt is related to things that were ordered by our previous President, George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the bank bailout.)