We may hear people bitch and moan about health care, and also bitch and moan about any changes to our current system, especially what we commonly call “socialized medicine.” One of our complaints is that in some countries there may be a wait for certain procedures or tests or for access to equipment like MRIs or CAT scans.
But here, where health care costs continue to rise without so much as a pause, we now have drug shortages and price gauging of drugs that raise some of those costs 50 times above the usual cost to patients. How is that better than those places we complain have socialized medicine? We continue to argue that our system is the best in the world (although survey after survey debunks that myth). Hundreds of hospitals have reported shortages, patients have died because drugs were unavailable and some analysts believe the drug shortages will cost more than $400 million a year in increased costs in buying drugs from third-party companies.
Without federal oversight, and no federal price gauging regulations, what’s to keep this from happening again and again? Here’s a place where regulation and oversight is money well spent. Pass legislation that prevents (with heavy fines and penalties) price gauging, that mandates continued production of drugs and broad notification if production is interrupted so other companies can pick up the slack. And what about legislation that helps these companies produced drugs here instead of overseas?
Setting up manufacture and production facilities is expensive, and some of those drugs, while life-saving, don’t sell normally at huge profit margins, so let’s make sure we can continue to produce them here without fear of shortages, and price gauging by third parties. That would add some stability to a health care issue that shouldn’t be an issue in a good health care system.
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