HHS Secretary Leavitt Sets up Medicare Drug Price Fight

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told reporters yesterday that the government shouldn’t negotiate Medicare drug prices with the drug makers. It wasn’t that he objected to the better deal taxpayers could get, or so he said. He didn’t like the idea that it could lead to something more, “It’s a surrogate for a much larger issue, which is really government-run health care.” Someone should tell him who just won the elections.

The current statistics show that the US spends more than any other nation for its healthcare, but that Americans don’t live the longest. Indeed, Americans lives as long as Costa Ricans, who spend vastly less. Some 43 million Americans have no health insurance. In short, those who oppose greater government involvement don’t have much of a record to defend. The market is failing on a vast scale.

Naturally, his opposition is ideological. Every other developed country in the world offers government-funded health insurance to its people. He may not like the socialists in Sweden, or those pinko Canadians, but what does he have against the capitalists Swiss, the rugged Aussies and the Japanese, whose cars out-compete America’s in part because Japanese car companies don’t have to pay to insure their employees and retirees. Just why does he approve of taxing business in this way?

Objectively, the health of a nation is built on the health of its population. The fact that disease can spread among individuals makes health a public good, just like defense. One can eat right, exercise daily, avoid tobacco and alcohol, but when someone entering Bloomingdale's or Dodger Stadium with anti-biotic resistant TB coughs, it won’t help. The insured may get the best medical care possible, but the uninsured and untreated are those in whose bodies those strains of TB have incubated in the first place. In other words, the individual with a lot of health insurance can still get sick, even die needlessly, in a nation where not everyone can see a doctor when illness strikes.

And why does the Department of Health and Human Services object to doing something that the Department of Veteran Affairs does? Soon-to-be Speaker Pelosi noted, “The drug prices negotiated on behalf of veterans are substantially lower than the prices seniors and individuals with disabilities receive from the drug plans under the Medicare Part D program,” Pelosi said recently.” Requiring the federal government to negotiate on behalf of seniors would generate significant savings, savings which could be used to close the gap in coverage or doughnut hole - that threatens millions of Medicare beneficiaries this year.” Fortunately, she has more votes in Congress than Mr. Leavitt.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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