JG editorial excerpt:The one thing we don’t want to give seniors is the power to negotiate lower prescription prices for themselves. Who knows, they may very well take over the entire pharmaceutical trade and create an atmosphere that would force drug companies to openly compete against each other for market share. Those arrogant and nasty seniors, what will they do next?
Giving the feds the power to negotiate lower prices for seniors could effectively cede control of the pharmaceutical industry to Washington.
Apparently, the plan by the Dems is to use the power of the government for one of its most important duties, that is, to represent the people against all others, even if it includes helping negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies. This is odd and very different to what we have been used to over the past twenty years, where just the opposite has been true. We have become accustomed to a government representing big business and private investors all in the name of economic growth. The health, welfare and environment of the people be damned.
The entire editorial is a slap against the will of the people and their ability to exercise the only power they possess.
JG editorial excerpt:
We understand why the Pentagon should have such a say over defense contractors; that industry is vital to our national security. Drug companies don’t rise to that threshold.
When something more often than not is vital to the health and welfare of its citizens, it does rise to the same threshold. Oftentimes, access to affordable drugs is just as important to the survival of an individual as is the strenght of a nations military is to the survival of a nation. For too long our elected officials have been running the government as if its their job to represent everybody but the people, Democrats need to break away from this old and greedy business formula and start representing the people they actually work for.
In a fair comparison, this low-price bargaining plan is actually a spin-off of the way Wal-Mart does business, but with a twist. On one hand, a small part of the Wal-Mart business model is designed using the most fundamental concept to gain customers, that is to sell some goods for the lowest price the market will bear. The difference being the government won’t be forcing pharmaceuticals to compete with global pressures, slave labor or cheap materials, simply because drugs are still a protected commodity. The Democrats simply want to consolidate the purchasing power of millions of seniors. No outsourcing, no labor camps and most of all, no ill- begotten profits.
However, we now know that Wal-Mart has used their huge volume buying power as leverage against private enterprise and forced them to compete with cheap labor, in order to get lower prices. Unfortunately, their drive for lower prices had no boundaries and they excluded the American worker, Wal-Mart chose to lower prices at any cost. We have been told that Wal-Mart’s ability to exert this pressure on manufacturers is a good thing because manufacturers wanting to do business with Wal-mart can no longer dictate prices. But for some reason, a non-for-profit consortium of consumers and seniors represented by their government exerting the same buyers pressure on pharmaceutical companies is misguided. While pharmaceuticals and Big Oil in particular, have been handed conditions allowing them to dictate prices as high as the market will bear, the political turnover of the recent election would be a good time for Democrats to seize some political capital for the American consumer. This should only be just the beginning.
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