Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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CFIF Opposes Executive Order Importing Foreign Nations’ Socialized Medicine and Drug Price Controls Print
By CFIF Staff
Monday, September 14 2020

ALEXANDRIA, VA  Yesterday, President Trump committed a needless unforced error by signing the "Most Favored Nation" executive order, effectively green-lighting the importation of prescription drug price controls from foreign nations, including some with socialized healthcare systems.  A massive coalition of 80 conservative and free-market organizations, including the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF), strongly opposes the order.  

Below is a statement by CFIF President Jeffrey Mazzella, who encourages the White House to immediately reconsider:

"As Americans know from experience with gas shortages in the 1970s, as well as from examples like Venezuela overseas, price controls simply do not work, regardless of the product targeted or the location they’re attempted.  Prescription drug price controls are no different.  Unfortunately, the White House’s executive order imposes such a scheme right here in America, despite President Trump’s earlier State of the Union speech promise to oppose all efforts to import socialism to America.  The order introduces a so-called International Pricing Index (IPI) for U.S. drugs administered by the federal government, meaning that foreign governments’ drug price controls would suddenly control our own reimbursement rates.  

"Consequently, those nations receive far fewer new lifesaving and life-improving drugs than American consumers.  For example, 96% of all new cancer drugs over the past decade were made available to U.S. consumers.  In contrast, only 56% of those same drugs became available in Canada, only 50% became available in Japan and only 11% in Greece, as just three examples.  That’s why America outpaces European nations in terms of cancer survival rates, among other advantages.  

"The Trump Administration itself once highlighted the destructive effect of importing foreign price controls, when in 2018 its Council of Economic Advisers affirmed that, 'If the United States had adopted the centralized drug pricing policy in other developed nations twenty years ago, then the world may not have highly valuable treatments for diseases that required significant investment.'

"The United States accounts for nearly two-thirds of all new drugs introduced worldwide, and our more market-oriented system and protection of patent rights explains why.  Instead of importing foreign nations’ price control schemes and their consequences, America should be exporting our superior system to their shores.

"CFIF urges President Trump to reconsider this potentially catastrophic order while there’s still time."

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Notable Quote   
 
"Americans do not trust several major U.S. institutions, including the national news media.The recently released Center Square Voters' Voice poll found that 43% of Americans say the media is trustworthy, compared with 54% who said it is not trustworthy.Younger people were more likely to trust the media, with 47% of those ages 18-34 saying they trust it and 46% saying the opposite.The numbers steadily…[more]
 
 
— Casey Harper, The Center Square
 
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