A thief never returns to the scene of the crime, the saying goes. But like many of the rules, laws and regulations that apply to typical Americans, this is an adage from which Washington politicians find themselves gleefully exempt. For if our national trove of scoundrels rousting about in the halls of Congress could not continually pilfer the hard-earned money of the American people, how could they possibly fill their days?
Ahead of the midterms and following a string of legislative defeats, Democrats in Washington remain as determined as ever to crack open the safe, rallying around a scaled-down spending package still bursting at the seams with more than a trillion dollars in grift. Among their targets once again are Americans’ access to prescription drugs and the manufacturers who bring them to market. Desperate to deliver on this issue, President Biden intensified his call during the State of the Union address for his party’s leaders to accelerate the passage of their plan to reduce drug costs through ham-fisted price controls.
What Biden and company won’t confess is that their proposal to “lower drug costs” for patients is merely a ruse to abscond with upward of $160 billion they plan to use to offset the costs of a slew of other policies unrelated to healthcare. They are also burying the dire consequences of this effort, a reduction of more than $660 billion in medical research and development. This in itself should be deeply troubling to every American.
The record regarding draconian cuts to medical R&D and the devastation it would inflict upon the American public is not in dispute. Democrats are well aware that siphoning this investment from medical innovation will lead to 135 fewer drugs entering the market over the next 20 years, with the effect of lowering U.S. life expectancy by almost two years by 2060. The Forum for Health Economics and Policy further calculated this would reduce overall lifetime welfare by a staggering $13.3 trillion for people born between 1949 and 2005.
Shorter life expectancy and access to fewer medications are side effects of price controls Democrats are more than willing to ignore. As smooth as cat burglars, Biden and liberal lawmakers brand their scheme as “negotiation,” insisting that the government and drug companies will come to a mutually agreeable price. In reality, their plan gives the government total authority to determine the price of any drug on a federal schedule or demand a 95 percent penalty if manufacturers don’t agree to government terms.
Progressive lawmakers crow that price controls lower drug costs, but they won’t tell the public the dirty secret that any supposed “savings” would go to the government to be spent on unrelated programs. There’s no guarantee any patient would ever see a penny of savings.
Champions of price controls sanctimoniously point to charts that allegedly expose the rising costs of drugs over the past decade; however these are list prices, a far cry from what patients themselves pay. While the consumer price index rose at a 40-year high of 7 percent last year, drug prices have risen a modest 2.5 percent since the onset of the pandemic. This is hardly a pretext for raiding the medicine cabinet.
Swiping funds that would otherwise fuel the engine of future medical innovation is nothing short of legislative embezzlement, robbing us all future healthcare treatments and life saving options. It is a transparent sham to shift resources from highly critical medical investment to Democrats’ long-standing wish list of green energy subsidies, public housing, universal pre-K, subsidized child care and every other budget-busting promise they can pull from Bernie Sanders’ campaign website.
Given the very public rebuke of senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema toward the outrageous $3.5 trillion price tag of Biden’s original spending plan, most Americans are aware — and overwhelmingly oppose — adopting the fiscal discipline of Venezuela in order to enact a cradle-to-grave safety net. What is less known by the public are the precise areas, such as medical innovation, patient health and life expectancy that would be ravaged by the Democrats’ duplicitous and criminally irresponsible price control scheme.
