Another Wrinkle

Okay, so maybe health care reform isn't quite as simple as I implied below. There's one other thing that's messed up.

In the Peter Singer article I referenced below, he starts out by using an example of a kidney cancer drug that costs %54,000 for six months.

You guessed it! The other thing that's messed up is the insane cost of prescription drugs. It's another thing that people in the rest of the developed world have much better access to than Americans. Their drug costs are regulated by their governments and are much cheaper. (Smuggled meds from Canada, anyone?)

The only legitimate-sounding argument I've ever heard about why Americans' drugs cost so much more than everyone else's is that we are paying for the cost of the companies' research and development of new drugs. Now, first of all, I'm not sure I believe that. But it could be true, simply because our government has clearly had no problem allowing companies to get what they want at the expense of the American consumer. (No doubt in their obsession to avoid anything that looks like socialism!)

(There are also those who blame it on higher American safety standards, saying that our meds are better regulated and those cheap drugs are unsafe. I don't get why stronger standards add that much expense. Not buying it.)

But here's the main thing. American drug companies (which are presumably all multi-national at this point anyway) are supposedly doing all this R&D to bring us the cures of the future. But what I've also heard is that they mostly, at this point in history, are focusing on the drugs that will make them money. They put their energy and resources into finding new uses for drugs they've already developed. They develop drugs for things like erectile dysfunction, but spend almost nothing on more important problems like tuberculosis, which is still killing thousands of people around the world these days.

So clearly, the "free market" is not a particularly good way of regulating drug research just like it's not a good way of providing health care.

So what if we put our resources into developing an international drug research funding organization? Take the costs of R&D out of the hands of the drug manufacturing companies, and put it in the hands of people who are accountable to the voting public, people who can responsibly decide what the priorities should be, without the bias of what will make the most money.

(I'm guessing we already have things like this at the national and international level and have just been way under-funding them for years. Probably there's currently a revolving door between them and the for-profit drug companies too.)

And don't tell me that people will stop manufacturing drugs if they can no longer make a killing doing it. Someone will do it. The drug companies have already adjusted what they do to adapt to the more civilized prescription med policies of other countries. They can do it here too, if we just give them something sensible to adapt to.