Last night the President spoke of “the challenge of entitlements” and said that “Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are commitments of conscience — and so it is our duty to keep them permanently sound.”
“With enough good sense and good will, you and I can fix Medicare and Medicaid — and save Social Security,” he averred. The ability of the federal government to negotiate drug prices has been an aspect of the recent debate over Medicare that was brought to the fore in the recent “100 hours” legislative agenda.
A number of conservative commentators have come out against this idea, including Acton’s own Rev. Jerry Zandstra and Benjamin Zycher of the Manhattan Institute (HT: The Reform Club). These are just two voices in a chorus of criticism rising against federal negotiation (I use them just because they are the ones with which I’m most familiar. I don’t mean to pick on anyone in particular).
Both of their arguments seem to me to boil down to this: the government is an effective negotiator and the result of negotiation will be that drug companies will have less money coming in and therefore spending on research and development will suffer.
Zandstra says of successful negotiation, “if, in doing so, you dry up research and development dollars so you aren’t developing drugs to treat cancer and Alzheimer’s and other diseases — if you take the profit motivation away — have you done good? No, you really haven’t.”
Zycher writes, “Federal price negotiations will cause sharp price reductions, but this will yield less research and development investment in new and improved medicines over time.”
These claims fail at a number of points in my opinion. Zycher and Zandstra are probably right on the mere claim that federal negotiation of drug prices will produce a drop in pharma income. But that isn’t the datum that is most relevant to the policy discussion.
Once government has decided to tax us and spend our money on a particular program, I think it is government’s responsibility to spend that money as well as it can, to be good stewards of efficient and productive use of those funds. This is true regardless of whether or not the program itself is one that government should be undertaking. The question of whether the government should be doing or pursuing a particular program or agenda is a different one than whether the government should pursue these programs efficiently and well.
So, given that Medicare is an entitlement to which our government has committed itself, it seems to me that the government is responsble for administering it as cost-effectively as possible. The government needs to make our tax dollars stretch as far as they can. This should include negotiating lower prices paid for prescription drugs, regardless of the effect it might have on drug company profits or research budgets.
It is a separate question whether drug companies need federal support to achieve the current or higher levels of funding for research and development. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that pharma companies do need federal support to find new drugs for “Alzheimer’s and other diseases.” If that’s the case, then the argument for subsidizing pharmaceutical research should be parsed out from the question of drug price negotiation.
Refusing to allow the feds to negotiate prescription drug prices effectively creates a subsidy for drug companies…something I would think that Zandstra and Zycher would be against, at least in principle. But maybe not.
Drug companies are in fact struggling, it seems. Pfizer, for instance, is shutting down operations at three Michigan sites and laying of 2400 workers, as part of a broader layoff of 10% of its workforce. And perhaps the estimated “loss of about five million life-years each year” is sufficient reason to support government subsidy of drug research.
But if conservatives are in favor of government subsidies for drug companies, they need to make that argument stand on its own and separate it from the question of price negotiation. Government subsidy of drug R&D should be a separate question, complete with its own line-item and its own policy analysis.