Resisting price controls on prescription drugs

A simple rule of economics: with price controls you get shortages. Good luck getting that prescription for your heart problems.

Washington Times  via FreedomWorks

"President Trump has made great strides in dismantling the big-government legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Historic tax cuts, dozens of regulations cut for every new one implemented, and two conservative Supreme Court justices, to name a few.

"President Trump’s free-market reforms have proven wildly successful. The economy is growing, and consumer confidence is at historically high levels. This progress makes it even more disappointing to see the White House considering price controls on prescription drugs.

"The White House is considering a proposal created by the Department of Health and Human Services to control U.S. prescription drug prices called the International Pricing Index (IPI). This system would determine how much to pay for drugs under Medicare Part B — including vaccines and cancer medications — based on their costs in other countries, including those with socialized health care systems. At the same time, Republican Sens. Scott Hawley and Rick Scott have introduced similarly ill-conceived legislation in Congress.

"If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. It would be incorrect to assume other countries have lower prescription drug costs because the markets naturally decided so. The International Pricing Index would be aggregating the drug prices of nations that have already artificially lowered drug prices.

"You can’t get something for nothing. The government cannot mandate lower drug prices and expect no consequences in the market. In fact, we have already seen the dangers of price controls in other sectors of the economy, from wages to housing. They interfere with supply and demand, causing waste and shortages." . . .

Empty supermarket shelves in Caracas, Venezuela,

Why Socialism Causes Shortages  . . . "Among the most conspicuous of socialism’s failings is its capacity to generate vast shortages of things essential for life. This is a universal feature of a socialist “economy,” and it always has been. In Maoist China, there was no meat and no fat in which to cook anything, if you could find something to cook. In Bolshevik Russia, there were never enough cars, apartments, or even loaves of bread. Every Latin American socialist experiment produced the same. All of this was thoroughly documented in the 1997 treatise The Black Book of Communism (among thousands of other books)." . . .