Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Will Medicare Part D secretly save us?
The thing that strikes me as almost amusingly ironic about Medicare Part D is that it shows the folly of leaving economic planning to the monopolistic corporations. The US throughout its history has disdained strategic economic planning by government because of the secular faith in the market among the country’s business leaders. So here we have the Medicare Modernization Act as developed by Big Pharma’s Pfizers, Mercks and their PhRMA lobby.
They fashioned the MMA, with its confusing, competing PDPs, specifically to prevent Medicare from acting as a single payer that could make volume discount purchases. After all, if they could elect George by manipulating an electoral system to create the illusion that 3,000 elderly Jews in Florida voted for Pat Buchanan, a Rube Goldberg MMA could certainly boost their earnings at taxpayers’ expense.
Now here we have consultants, journalists and equity analysts forecasting that by decade’s end, the MMA will do precisely what the CEO malefactors wanted to avoid -- that is push the US closer to the rest of the world in terms of a national payer system, greater transparency in drug pricing and cost constraints. I dread to think what would happen if Big Pharma’s CEOs were half as bright as their sycophants in Pharmaceutical Executive and the other vanity rags claim.
By the way, the crew running big Pharma in 2003 will be long gone counting their millions by the time those chickens come home to their successors’ roosts.
They fashioned the MMA, with its confusing, competing PDPs, specifically to prevent Medicare from acting as a single payer that could make volume discount purchases. After all, if they could elect George by manipulating an electoral system to create the illusion that 3,000 elderly Jews in Florida voted for Pat Buchanan, a Rube Goldberg MMA could certainly boost their earnings at taxpayers’ expense.
Now here we have consultants, journalists and equity analysts forecasting that by decade’s end, the MMA will do precisely what the CEO malefactors wanted to avoid -- that is push the US closer to the rest of the world in terms of a national payer system, greater transparency in drug pricing and cost constraints. I dread to think what would happen if Big Pharma’s CEOs were half as bright as their sycophants in Pharmaceutical Executive and the other vanity rags claim.
By the way, the crew running big Pharma in 2003 will be long gone counting their millions by the time those chickens come home to their successors’ roosts.
