June 23, 2014
Every economist knows that when you put a 20 percent tariff on imported clothes it leads to inefficiency and corruption. For some reason they don’t seem to know that when you give out patent monopolies that can raise prices by 2000 percent or more above the free market price that it leads to big-time inefficiency and corruption.
Reality is working hard to teach economists. Today the Washington Post had an article reporting on how many hospitals appear to be profiting from a program that allows them to buy drugs at a discount from the patent protected price. The program is ostensibly designed to provide drugs to low-income people.
This sort of program would of course be unnecessary if drugs were sold in a free market. There would be no reason to establish complicated discount systems if drugs were selling for $5-$10 per prescription, as is generally the case for generic drugs. This would require an alternative mechanism for financing drug research, but folks who have heard of the National Institutes of Health know that alternative mechanisms exist. (Yes, NIH mostly does basic research, but that it a policy choice not a fact of nature.)
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