As Senate Finance Committee Convenes on Healthcare Costs, First Do No Harm
As the United States Senate Finance Committee convenes today for a meeting entitled "The Rising Cost of Health Care: Considering Meaningful Solutions for All Americans," the enduring adage of medical care applies: Do no harm.
Specifically, as we've detailed at CFIF, we must especially avoid potentially catastrophic ideas like drug price controls (whether through so-called "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) programs or any other) and violations of patent and intellectual property (IP) protections in which the United States leads the world. Indeed, our more free-market approach explains why America leads the world in lifesaving healthcare innovation, accounting for an astonishing two-thirds of all new drugs introduced to the world each year:
The reasons that MFN schemes would only exacerbate…[more]
Michael Barone, the dean of American politics, has often observed that the omnipresent challenge facing the Democratic party throughout its long history has been the task of proverbially herding cats.
That is, Democrats have always been a tenuous amalgam of disparate and sometimes conflicting splinter groups and special interests. As Barone notes, that inherent tension often generates conflict:
[T]he Republican Party is the party of people who are considered, by themselves and by others, as “normal Americans” – Northern white Protestants in the 19th century…