Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 10:20 AM by Gene

My Biz is My Biz must be thinking of his Big Pharma stocks again:

In ABC's New Hampshire debate, McCain said: "Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?" A conservative's answer is:

That amounts to importing Canada's price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others -- new pain-relieving, life-extending pharmaceuticals -- would be unavailable. Setting drug prices by government fiat rather than market forces results in huge reductions of funding for research and development of new drugs. McCain's evident aim is to reduce pharmaceutical companies' profits. But if all those profits were subtracted from the nation's health-care bill, the pharmaceutical component of that bill would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent -- and innovation would stop, taking a terrible toll in unnecessary suffering and premature death. When McCain explains that trade-off to voters, he will actually have engaged in straight talk.

And by the time he'll have ended his straight talk, half the voters will feel numb and the other half will think they've been hoodwinked through a better form of lobbying. That Canada has state controls does not justify the mess of our health care system -- and we suspect other than remedies easily copied from Cato and AEI Biz doesn't have a clue. Why should he? He can pay for his health care tens of thousands of times over, through multiple employers.

Columnists are getting as useful as bloggers.