Don't screw up our drug industry

The Democrats are hell-bent on imposing more government into our pharmaceutical industry. John Kyl explains what they're trying to do and why it's so wrong-headed.

But now Democrats say that they don't believe that competition is working, and they want the government bureaucracy to step in and fix prices, despite the fact that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly stated that private sector negotiations are effectively working to lower prices. More importantly, the CBO has repeatedly said that the Democrat model will not lower prices unless it also restricts choice and access to important medications.

Rather than the competitive free market plans that allow seniors to choose an option that best meets their health care needs, the Democrats want a "one size fits all" approach that puts the government between seniors and their doctors.

Proponents of government intervention say they simply want to use the market power of the large number of Medicare beneficiaries to lower prices. But private pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) already use this same market clout to negotiate lower prices. In fact, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, the three largest PBMs already negotiate on behalf of four times as many beneficiaries (200 million) as the entire Medicare population (44 million).

The choice is clear: a government-run health care bureaucracy that restricts choice and rations care or a consumer-driven health care system that expands health care options while controlling costs. The prescription drug legislation has put this choice to the test, and seniors have proven that they prefer the Republican model. Seniors have independently chosen plans that provide more health care options at lower costs. For example, 88 percent of seniors who enrolled in a prescription drug plan in 2007 chose a plan that offered coverage other than the standard benefit, and this year seniors have chosen plans with 13 percent more available medications than last year.

The debate on "non-interference" is, therefore, a proxy for whether we should pursue health care reform with more or less health care options for consumers, more or less government control, and more or less interference between the government and patients. Seniors have made their choice clear by making the prescription drug benefit a resounding success. The question is whether politicians know better than the patients.

The Democrats prefer the short-term political gain that they can get by passing some sort of bill that Bush would veto and then they could claim that they're doing more to help the elderly get low-cost drugs. The fact that there is already a huge new entitlement that is already helping seniors save money on their drugs while not imposing government price controls through interference in the price negotiations between the insurance and drug companies. They just can't stand to let even that level of free market work. Meanwhile, their interference could well stifle one of our most important industries just when they might be on the verge of discoveries that could help fight untold diseases. I so wish that politicians would keep their hands off of the drug companies and let them do their jobs trying to do the very expensive and time-consuming research it takes to develop new treatments.