Santorum to Sick Kid: Don't Complain About $1 Million Drug Costs

From Crooks and Liars:

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder on Tuesday that she shouldn't have a problem paying $1 million a year for drugs because Apple's iPad can cost around $900.

Speaking to more than 400 people at Woodland Park, Colorado, the former Pennsylvania senator said that demand should set prices for drugs.

And

"Look, I want your son and everybody to have the opportunity to stay alive on much-needed drugs," Santorum insisted. "But the bottom line is, we have to give companies the incentive to make those drugs. And if they don't have the incentive to make those drugs, your son won't be alive and lots of other people in this country won't be alive."

More here, with video.

It's tempting to dismiss it as more Santorum kookiness, but this is fairly typical of the right-wing view on health care. That is, for conservatives, economic orthodoxy trumps compassion and decency. Always. It is more important to worship capitalism than it is to heal the sick and feed the hungry.

And that's what the situation described above actually is, the worship of capitalism. I mean, the equation Santorum sets up here, survival of the capitalist system versus the need to avoid bankruptcy, or to avoid death, is totally false, generally speaking. For starters, a lot of these super-expensive drugs sold in the US sell for greatly reduced prices on the global market simply because other nations don't worship capitalism the way we do, and tell Big Pharma that if they want to do business in within their borders they can't charge that much. And guess what? The drug companies still make a profit. Furthermore, US health insurance companies, as well as the VA, don't have to pay that much, either, because they use their massive purchasing power to bargain for lower prices. Again, the drug companies make a profit selling at these lower prices.

But Santorum's real, and by "real," I mean "false," knockout punch here is invoking the drug companies' go-to justification for price gouging, "research." That is, capitalist worshipers always assert that Big Pharma just has to price gouge because they need the money for research, and without all that research money, they won't be able to sell us the latest version of Prilosec or Prozac or whatever chemical to which they add a new molecule so as to create a new patent and start the price gouging cycle over once again. And apparently America, the only market that puts up with this shit, is also the only market that has to pay for all that "research."

Well, I don't know the exact percentage breakdown off the top of my head, but I do know that a lot of drug research, but not all, is done at universities and other federally supported scientific institutions: generally, the patents on these drugs, researched using taxpayer dollars, are simply handed over to Big Pharma, for free, ready to be manufactured and distributed at exorbitant costs to the US market. Licensing these patents, with strict regulations on prices, rather than just giving them away to greedy corporations, would be a nice start for dealing with this issue, but it wouldn't solve the problem entirely.

Frankly, I think the real solution is putting all drug research into the feds' hands. Either that, or just straight-up funding private research using federal dollars, with lots of strings attached, of course, particularly on prices in the US market. In other words, worship of capitalism and good health care for the population are simply incompatible. You've got to go socialist to some extent. And that's the point, really. The economics of health care are just fucked up when you try to push them into the neoliberal platitudes of a college freshman intro to econ class. Health care, academically speaking, is an advanced course.

Unfortunately, our public dialogue on health care, which is dominated by conservative retards, is decidedly eighth grade. Our fucked up system will probably be the death of me one day.

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