The government can always clamp price controls on the successful drugs in the name of preventing "profiteering." But that means reducing the incentives to continue the investments -- tens of billions of dollars -- necessary to keep developing new drugs. In the short run, politicians can get themselves elected by bringing down drug prices. In the long run, more people will die needlessly because the same massive level of investment in the development of new medicines will not take place.
Price controls have been politically popular and economically disastrous for centuries. That is because neither the politicians nor the voters look beyond the immediate lure of something-for-nothing to the repercussions that follow, time and again. These repercussions include shortages, quality deterioration and black markets. None of this is new. Similar things happened in Roman times. But who reads history these days?
The politicians' other great medical fraud is creating the impression that people without health insurance are without medical treatment. That has not been true for a very long time, if it was ever true in this country.
Half a century ago, I was treated at one of the finest medical facilities in America, at a time when I could not afford medical insurance or even life insurance. I paid off the bill in installments. Today, people are treated at hospitals all across the country, whether they have medical insurance or not, and whether they can afford to pay anything or not.
There are many people -- including affluent people -- who do not choose to be insured, precisely because of the availability of medical treatment for people who are not insured. Healthy young people may prefer to have a newer or snazzier car instead of paying insurance premiums to cover things they don't expect to need.
None of the countries with government-controlled medicine can match the quality of health care or of medical and pharmaceutical advances in the United States. If it ain't broke, don't fix it -- and, especially, don't let politicians fix it.