The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Healthy Discussion

6.12.02 @ 12:01AM

ONE'S MEDICINE
Re: Lawrence Henry's Drugs and Me -- and You:

Loved this article. Thank you.
-- Sherri Goodman
Arizona

I agree with your article. I, too, have a kidney transplant -- 30 years. I was 27 years old and I agree without our drug companies I would not be here. In fact, I argued this fact to an economist (Ph.D.) last week who felt (after seeing Peter Jennings) that all the research should be nationalized! Luckily I had just taken my blood pressure pills prior to this comment!

Last April my kidney started to fail; I was switched to Cellcept and am on a low protein diet (50-60 grams a day, usually around 50). So far things are a lot better for me.

Enjoyed your article,
-- Margaret Young
Cincinnati, OH

Perhaps Robert Torricelli does want Lawrence Henry dead. It wouldn't surprise me -- Torricelli seems like that kind of guy, you know? However, Douglas Forrester only wants Lawrence alive until the moment he can no longer afford his drugs.

While it's true that drugs companies do manufacture miraculous medicines to keep patients like Lawrence Henry alive, they also do things like manufacture slightly altered versions of drugs to circumvent patent laws. This keeps the miraculous drugs expensive far longer than should be the case (or would be the case in the free market). In addition, they inflate prices to reclaim billions of dollars in marketing costs (in many cases to push new drugs that don't work as well as older, cheaper ones), then cry "R&D" whenever anyone questions it. And this is before their deals with insurance companies and the consumer's ignorance about drug prices screw things up further.

Drug companies claim that if they're not allowed to reap tremendous, unchecked profit margins, then maybe the next time Lawrence Henry needs a kidney they might not make that new drug he needs. This is a "we'll-take-our-ball-and-go-home" argument that demands gratitude for being held over a barrel. If a man saves your life and takes everything you own in the process, you should be grateful. But if he only needed half your stuff to cover his R&D, pay the stockholders a nice dividend, and send his kid to a private college ... and he still took everything ... well, then you'd be [angry]. And you'd be right.
-- Matthew Meltzer
Los Angeles, CA

Lawrence Henry replies: Well, allowing that Mr. Meltzer's "argument" is scarcely coherent, what does "Robert Torricelli," as synecdoche for the Democratic Party, propose to do instead? All the supposed horrors Mr. Meltzer cites in drug pricing can be traced to regulation and price controls. Our own medical universe is full of them. More important, many foreign countries compel our drug companies essentially to sell at a loss.

UNDER WESTERN EYES:
Re: George Neumayr's Churchill and India:

My friend George Neumayr seems to accept the media's doomsday assumption that India and Pakistan will nuke it out. He also accepts the assumption that India has been de-westernized, claiming that "No one who knows India today" can dispute Churchill's wisdom, etc. I never dispute Churchill's wisdom, but I also know that wisdom expressed in the 1930s, however much we romanticize it, does not necessarily apply to today. India's done so much westernizing lately that many conservative foreign policy mavens consider playing the India card against China. As for the doomsday scenario, it seems already to be de-escalating; pray that it continues. George seldom believes the media, but he may have swallowed this time.
-- K. E. Grubbs Jr.

NOT MY DEPARTMENT
Having read Jed Babbin's column "Homeland Security Circus," I think it might be interesting to think back to Mrs. Thatcher in the days of her glory when it was suggested to her to create a new department.

It was reported that she "chewed on" the proposer by saying "I told you to deal with the problem, not to make it worse. Once we have an entire government department whose size, pay, and perquisites depend upon the existence of the problem, we'll never get rid of it."

If the bigger government personages of a Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt are "hell bent for leather" in forming G.W.'s department, something has got to be wrong.
-- Ken Wyman
Huntsville, AL

Jed Babbin replies: It's against my religion to disagree with Lady Thatcher, but I think the thought doesn't fit our situation. We're in a new situation, and our government in its current form is clearly incapable of dealing with this threat. We need to keep our eye on this new agency to make sure it doesn't grow like kudzu (and its acronym is a bad omen. DOHs sounds like something out of Homer Simpson).

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, Religion, Environment, Law, Pakistan