November 13th, 2006

Great op/ed in the Washington Post on "A Drug Price Path to Avoid"

Posted in  Health Care 
Author: Tom Giovanetti || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA

Our friend Alberto Mingardi of the Instituto Bruno Leoni, based in Italy, has an excellent op/ed in Sunday's Washington Post on "A Drug Price Path to Avoid."

Alberto was a featured speaker at an event IPI did in September on Capitol Hill entitled

"The Dangers of Undermining Patient Choice: Lessons from Europe and Canada."

Streaming video of the event is available here, if you're interested.

Since we're constantly hearing calls for more Europeon-styled health care systems in the U.S., the idea behind our event was to make sure people in the U.S. who are making health care policy hear first-hand from policy experts in Europe about how badly Europe has mangled its health care sector.

Alberto's well-timed op/ed suggests that:

The next speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has let it be known that within her first 100 hours on the job, she will move to allow the government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to obtain lower drug prices for Medicare patients.

Her plan would create a Medicare drug program that looks a lot like the system we have in my country, Italy, where drug prices are among the lowest in Europe. And that's pretty low, considering that drugs in Europe average about 60 percent less than in the United States. Even as U.S. prices rose, Italian drug prices decreased by 5 percent last year.

At first glance, this might seem an enviable model for America to follow. But before Pelosi rushes down the road to Italian-style health care, allow me to offer a word of caution. Italy is hardly a health-care paradise. In fact, it's more like a quagmire of red tape.

He goes on to describe how government efforts to control prices on health care inevitably leads to rationing and a decrease in quality of care. Let's hope people read it and pay attention.