Center for a Free Economy president Ryan Ellis writes in the Washington Examiner that President Trump “has caved to the socialists” by proposing to set the prices that Medicare pays for certain drugs at a percentage of the prices that foreign governments set for those drugs:
Unfortunately, rather than fighting the socialists, the president has decided to become one with them — at least when it comes to prescription drugs. After spending most of this year rightly condemning governments in Europe and elsewhere for ripping off Americans by imposing below-market price controls on drugs, Trump and [Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex] Azar basically surrendered to the price controls and announced we would be adopting them ourselves…
By letting the foreign price controls serve as a reference price control here, Trump has put us down the same path of scarcity and rationing all too often seen in the rest of the developed world.
The purpose of Trump’s proposal is indeed to reduce the prices Medicare pays for these drugs. Medicare currently pays much more for these drugs than government-run health systems in other nations.
Beyond that, Ellis’s oped crystallizes everything conservatives get wrong about drug pricing and Medicare purchasing in general. A few clarifications:
- No one knows what the “right” price is for any drug. We need market prices because they create incentives that naturally and always push prices in the right direction.
- Medicare’s administered (read: ouiji-board) prices are indeed price controls, but not in the usual meaning of the term. They do not restrain prices anywhere but within the Medicare program.
- Medicare’s administered/controlled prices are not market prices, any more than other governments’ administered/controlled prices are market prices.
- The Trump proposal would merely change the way Medicare comes up with the prices it pays for drugs. Those prices would not be any more “price-controlled” after the Trump proposal than they were before. They would just be lower–if the proposal achieves its stated goal, that is, which may or may not happen (more below).
- Conservatives who argue Medicare should not pay less than it currently does for drugs need to address the paradox inherent in their argument that, in order to restrain government and have a free economy, government must spend more. In order to fight socialism, taxes must be higher.
- One cannot import a price control. That’s not how they work. A government can either impose price controls on its own populace, or not. It cannot import the coercion another government exerts on its own citizens.
Ellis is correct when he writes, “Markets do a much better job reducing drug prices than government price controls do, and they do it while making prescription medicines widely available to patients, as opposed to rationed due to scarcity.” But the end result of these misunderstandings and misconceptions is that conservatives end up crowding out markets and/by opposing efforts to reduce government spending. This is why the Left believes, with justification, that when it comes to health care conservatives are just a bunch of cronyists.
Another irony: the more likely impact of Trump’s reference-pricing scheme is that prices in other nations would rise, which is exactly what Ellis says he wants.
Overcharged by Cato adjunct scholars Charlie Silver and David Hyman is the antidote to this strand of un-conservative conservative thinking.
