George Will, The Houston Chronicle, January 19, 2008
In 2004, one of John McCain’s closest associates, John Weaver, spoke to John Kerry about the possibility of McCain running as Kerry’s vice presidential running mate. In No Excuses, Bob Shrum’s memoir of his role in numerous presidential campaigns, including Kerry’s, Shrum writes that Weaver assured Kerry that “McCain was serious about the possibility of teaming up with him,” and Kerry approached McCain. He, however, was more serious about seeking the 2008 Republican nomination.
But was it unreasonable for Kerry to think McCain might be comfortable on a Democratic ticket? Not really.
In ABC’s New Hampshire debate, McCain said: “Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?” A conservative’s answer is:
That amounts to importing Canada’s price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others — new pain-relieving, life-extending pharmaceuticals — would be unavailable. Setting drug prices by government fiat rather than market forces results in huge reductions of funding for research and development of new drugs. McCain’s evident aim is to reduce pharmaceutical companies’ profits. But if all those profits were subtracted from the nation’s health care bill, the pharmaceutical component of that bill would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent — and innovation would stop, taking a terrible toll in unnecessary suffering and premature death. When McCain explains that trade-off to voters, he will actually have engaged in straight talk.
There are decent, intelligent people who believe that equity or efficiency or both are often served by government setting prices. In America, such people are called Democrats.
The idea we shouldn’t import drugs from Canada flies in the face of a conservative principle -the marketplace.
It’s like saying we shouldn’t import Japamese cars because their govt is different from ours. The fact is stiff competition with the Japanese is why cars are so much better today. Remember the old saw “a ford will nickle and dime you to death”? Will is full of beans.
It is true, however, that setting prices by govt fiat would kill the incentive to do R&D in any industry.
Comment by grimgold — January 22, 2008 @ 11:10 pm