Prometheus 6   

I think that is a good idea. Everyone should get drugs from Canada. I am a supporter of the free market, and if we are forced to bear the cost of Canada's price-capped medicine, we should be able to make Canada pay for that. Buy Canadian medicine, and perhaps Canada will be forced to reconsider its policy of making Americans subsidized its welfare medical system.

I suspect Corporate America would rather make SOME money than NO money. And the public relations generated by refusing to sell medicine to Canada would be a nightmare. And you'd see patents being cancelled worldwide. And Big Pharma would have to adjust its tactic.

Haven't you learned ANYTHING from watching the Iraq debacle?

Well, maybe refusing to sell drugs may go a bit too far, but there has to be some way to recover the costs inflicted on us by other nations enforcing artificially low prices on their drugs.

Maybe our drug prices are artificially high.

Well, why don't we cap our prices too and see if we get the same level of development, and the same number of new drugs that we had before?

I am more likely to think that theirs are artificially low, because otherwise, there would be no point in having price caps. And yes, ours are artificially high, but let's put the blame in the appropriate place. If the western half of US states caps the price of the entire menu of McDonald's products at 38 cents, is it that much of a stretch to think that McDonald's will act to protect the interests of teh shareholders, as is their fiduciary duty, by raising the prices of burgers elsewhere? I don't blame McDonald's for that action. They would be guilty of violating their responsibility to their shareholders if tehy didn't raise prices. The government is to blame, as it is with most things, because it exercises irrestistable and unaccountable monopoly power.

Well, why don't we cap our prices too and see if we get the same level of development, and the same number of new drugs that we had before?

I think serious collective barganing by Medicare officials would do it, but price caps are an acceptable substitute to me.

If the western half of US states caps the price of the entire menu of McDonald's products at 38 cents, is it that much of a stretch to think that McDonald's will act to protect the interests of teh shareholders, as is their fiduciary duty, by raising the prices of burgers elsewhere? I don't blame McDonald's for that action. They would be guilty of violating their responsibility to their shareholders if tehy didn't raise prices.

*shakes my nappy head*

"shakes my nappy head"

Riiiight. I suppose you reject outright the logic I am using without even thinking about it.

Are you aware that price caps have NEVER benefitted anything? Need I remind you of the gasoline lines in the 70's? I didn't live through that, but I know that no other country, despite being experiencing the same embargo we did, did not have that problem of shortages.

I know it is vogue and fashionable to envy and hate certain people or certain organizations simply because they make money. Pharmaceuticals are one of the more popular targets these days. But this hyper-emotional, irrational attitude will never accomplish anything. Real solutions call for identifying the real problems, and teh real problem here is not the companies. It is the foreign governments and politicians who enjoy electoral popularity at the expense of American drug consumers. Why can you not muster the moral outrage to condemn the politicians? Or do you naively believe that anyone who steps up to a podium and delivers long-winded impassioned oratory about how much they care for other people really do care about anything more than their own careers, popularity, and their own profits?

Riiiight. I suppose you reject outright the logic I am using without even thinking about it.

Nope. I reject it without rethinking about it. Not a single point you raise is new.

Need I remind you of the gasoline lines in the 70's? I didn't live through that, but I know that no other country, despite being experiencing the same embargo we did, did not have that problem of shortages

I lived through it.

Our shortages were as much a matter of the way we use gasoline as anything else. The embargo was announced, people ran out, filled up every gas tank they could get their hands on and POW! instant shortage. Not to mention that we just use more oil per capita than anyone else. We use more of ALL the resouces of the planet than anyone else. And finally, the oil embargo was not caused by price caps.

You need a LOT more experience than you have before you can call me naive. You who complain about politicians pursuing profits at the expense of the greater good while giving a free pass to entities whose whole reason to exist is neatly encapsulated by your complaint.

Trust me, Brian…you are the only reader who thinks I'm accepting of either political team.

Simple economics man. When supplies are limited, prices go up. We had a shortage because prices were not free to reflect the current supply. If prices had been allowed to rise, people would have cut consumption. You should be all for that, seeing as how you think we use too much in the first place. Prices are not just a way of making money, they are a signalling mechanism, and that is why no socialist system can ever function. Absent the price mechanism, no one has any idea how to allocate resources in the most efficient manner. Basic economics.

No, the oil embargo was not caused by price caps. The shortages were.

Now, since I was not actually there to sit in a gas line, and thereby soak in some transcendental knowledge of what was causing the mess from the very atmosphere around me like you were able to do, I will quote from someone who is old enough to have been there

The shortages in the United States had little to do with the embargo. Price controls imposed in August 1971 by the Nixon administration prevented major oil companies from passing on the full cost of imported crude oil to consumers at the pump. "Big Oil" did the only sensible thing: It cut back on imports and stopped selling oil to independent service stations in order to keep its own franchisees supplied. By the summer of 1973, gasoline prices were exploding, pumps were running dry, and long lines were commonplace. And that was before the Arab oil embargo or production cutbacks were announced.

Congress responded by making matters worse with the September 1973 Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act. Gasoline distribution would henceforth be rationed and the price of "new" oil - including imports - was decontrolled even though "old" oil was not. Perversely enough, this exacerbated the shortages that the EPAA was trying to remedy. That's because long-term contracts - the means by which most oil was sold at the time - did not rise to meet spot prices. Contract holders thus had a strong incentive to stockpile as much oil as they could at the very time when inventories should have been released on the market.

Again, simple economics. It is why soap bubbles are round. Efficiency. There is an underlying order to all things, and the economy is part of that rational system.