I had my own "beer bonding" moment this weekend, though the beverage was water. A close friend and I--whose political views are usually so divergent as to be better left unspoken--had a civil, productive discussion about health-care reform. We brought up no positions or persons about whom we presumably disagree, but we came up with a short list of reforms that we would both like to see implemented, and that we both fear will not be (does anyone know if these are in the 615-page Senate Bill or the 850-page House bill under consideration?):
- Put a cap on torts (as Peggy Noonan pointed out Friday in a WSJ article, this needs to be rephrased: "Stop calling it 'tort reform'; normal people think a tort is something you eat for dessert. Call it the Limiting Lawyers’ Windfalls bill")
- Put a cap on pharmaceutical prices
- Require health-care providers to post their prices so consumers can compare (I blogged about that here)
- Rewrite laws so that nurses and pharmacists can provide more primary care, as they do in most European countries.
1 comment:
Caps on drug prices is problematic. Drugs are expensive to develop and bring to market and most will fail. It's a high risk environment, so the reward needs to be great enough to make the risk worth it. Add in uncertainty regulatory and general governmental meddling and demagogue-ing , and you need a reward higher still. To even have a chance of this working without bad consequences, the risk needs to be greatly reduced - which means, among other things, a complete reassessment of the regulation and law around drugs.
Plus, as a general rule, price controls don't work.
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