Cool, another plan that ignores the underlying problem because the medical industry has a billion lobbyists and special interest groups in D.C.
Maybe if any political party was man enough to tell Pfizer that their monopoly on new drugs is no longer going to be valid costs could go down.
Compe ion achieves an efficient market. As it is, government-sponsored patents create monopolies for things like new drugs, MRI machines, robotic surgical tools, and more. These monopolies will never charge the fair market price until their monopoly dies in the 20 years or whatever re ed length it is. I don't even know how a merger between giants Pfizer and Wyeth was ever allowed.
The GOP talks about the free market yet doesn't care about the driving force behind it, compe ion. Both the GOP and dem plans do nothing to bring normal pricing structures to drugs and machines, which cons ute large medical expenditures that get handed down to the customer. They let these monopolies exist, but they get paid by the taxpayer instead of out of pocket.
I just looked it up. Drug and tech patents last 20 years. Pharmaceutical corps pay more in marketing than they do in R&D too, so they just fleece patients to increase the bottom line, not to research new drugs.
But like I said, the corporate lobby is and will always be the problem in these situations. Since so many drugs originate from the U.S., we could reduce drug prices across the globe by actually putting compe ion back into the drug market. We could make $400 prescriptions and 1.5 million dollar machines in the past.
But we won't. Or rather, our alleged representatives wont.
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