Evil Pharmaceutical Companies Developing Vaccines - For.... Profit!

President Obama's chief state goal for his health care proposals are to control costs by eliminating wasteful and unneeded spending on health care. But if you look at the guts of the proposals, the only cost containment measures are to reign in reimbursement rates or to make whole classes of procedures not covered. So in the name of covering everyone, everyone will be get less coverage.

But it is the cost containment piece that seems untenable to me. The headline in this morning's paper was "Big vaccine makers take lead in swine flu fight." The article notes that Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis reported making its first batch of H1N1 vaccine in early June and started clinical trials in July. Which leads me to the question, how is Obama going to stop a foreign company from making a profit on the swine flu vaccine, especially if it is the only company to make the vaccine? The article also notes that some small San Diego biotechs "are pursuing experimental approaches that could prove important if conventional vaccines run low or become ineffective." How long do you think that venture capitalists will fund these start-ups if strict profit caps are put on such companies. For all the talk about rising costs, a big part of the reason that health care is consuming a larger share of spending is that we have chosen this through a somewhat free-market process. We spend less on other things, like food and clothing, because they don't require high tech, and more on something we care about, like surviving swine flu. How is this bad? Unless we are going to nationalize the entire economy like say, North Korea, there will be inevitable upward pressure on health care spending. Trying to stop that will only result in outrageous injustices like denying people access to vaccines or paying doctors so little that they opt out of the government system.

Read this NY Times article on Medicare patients not finding doctors because of low federal reimbursement rates. This will be the fate of everyone locked into government plans if the cost containment proposed passes. For Tea Partiers attending Town Hall meetings, if they don't all get canceled, I have another question to ask:

5. To prevent doctors from opting out of "the public option" like they are doing with Medicare are you going to impose jail time or just fines on physicians who don't play ball?