The American Spectator

Margaret Young br> Cincinnati, OH /p>

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.

p>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. br> — Matthew Meltzer br> Los Angeles, CA /p>

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.

p> UNDER WESTERN EYES : br> Re: George Neumayr’s