By Grace-Marie Turner |
RealClearHealth | April 28, 2021
The debate over expanding government control of our health sector should have ended during the Covid-19 pandemic:
- Where there have been failures in responding to the crisis, it has been a failure of big government—such as the Center for Disease Control’s arrogant and clumsy insistence on controlling early development of testing that delayed the U.S. response and surely cost lives. Or the failure to protect those most at risk, especially seniors in nursing homes. Or CDC’s decades-long refusal to develop a modern data tracking system.
- Where there have been successes—such as producing and delivering medical supplies and conducting research to develop vaccines at warp speed—it is the private sector that has shown it can deliver.
But House Democrats on Thursday introduced a bill that would impose huge financial penalties on the pharmaceutical industry, drying up resources needed for the very research that is saving lives today.
H.R. 3 would impose price controls on U.S. drug sales based upon prices in certain European countries—countries that have decimated their pharmaceutical research capacity and that deny their citizens access to the newest, life-saving drugs. U.S. patients have access to 90% of the newest drugs; in France, patients can access fewer than half and only 14% in Spain and Greece, for example.