Posted by Derek
I haven't written about the various health care reform packages that are being hammered out and hammered through the various parts of Congress. That's partly because I began to think fairly early on in the process that we weren't actually going to see something happen as quickly as the administration wanted, which meant that there were still plenty of twists and turns left. I still think that's true - in fact, I have no idea when a final bill will ever get Frankensteined together for a vote, and no one else seems to have a good idea, either.
And since the main focus of this blog is pharmaceutical research, the first question I have to deal with is what effect such a bill will have on what I (and many of the readers here) do for a living. Absent a good idea of what the legislation will really look like, that's impossible to do in detail. But I can paint some broad strokes at this point, and they're probably not going to come as much of a surprise: I don't like what I see.
On the macro level, I don't like the administration's rhetoric on this issue. I do not believe that health care costs are crippling our economy, and the implication that they're tied to our current economic downturn seems specious. (And yes, that argument has been made, and more than once). Such an any-weapon-to-hand approach seems a bit different from what many people may have thought that they were voting for in the last election.
But I didn't vote for Obama, although I certainly wasn't crazy about the McCain-Palin ticket, either. My fears (expressed here) that he might turn out to be a zealous world-changing reformer have been amply confirmed. What do I have against zealous world-changing reformers, you ask? Why, I fear that the world is trickier than they are, for one thing. And too many of these people seem to come across as "If you people would just have enough sense to see that I'm doing this for your own good" types. At the rate we're going, that'll be the key phrase in a presidential speech right after Labor Day. (Mickey Kaus has been pointing out for some time now that this eat-your-peas-for-the-common-good approach is not doing the administration any favors).
The only big changes I'm in the mood for, generally speaking, are ones that give people more control over their own destiny, and if that's what we're seeing here, I've missed it. (I'm not alone). I guess that I just don't believe that systems this large and this complex are subject to wholesale intervention by the Wise and the Good. I worry that the Wise and Good will, in fact, decide that if they're truly going to control costs that they're going to ration health care in ways that people aren't necessarily expecting. Part of that rationing may well have to be either de facto (or flat-out de jure) price controls on pharmaceuticals and other parts of the system - and if applied thoroughly enough, these will be an excellent way of creating shortages of just the things that are being controlled, in the same way that price controls have always functioned. Some of those shortages will be silent ones: the things we don't discover.
Alternatively, we could end up with a Great Big Plan that doesn't really attempt to cut costs, or defers those cost savings into the glorious future. It's worth considering that, as far as I can see, every single attempt to run a large state-sponsored heath plan has ended up costing far, far more than even the most pessimistic initial estimates. And this time will be different. . . how, exactly?
And that leads us to the sort of bill that I think we're most likely to get: one that doesn't satisfy the biggest advocates of sweeping health care reform, since it's had to abandon the big proposals for the sake of political reality, but one that at the same time spends lots and lots more money, with no clear plan of how to raise these funds, all of that again for the sake of political reality. One, in short, that gives all the politicians involved a chance to pin "I Passed Health Care Reform!" buttons on their jackets while pissing off everyone who bothers to look at the thing closely, and one that commits us to spending oceans of money to accomplish not very much.
Perhaps I'm just in a bad mood. But that looks like what we're heading for.
pipeline.corante.com |
