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]
In welcome pre-holiday news last week for everyone except those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Labor Department announced that job growth exceeded all expectations last month, as U.S. employers added 266,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate plummeted to a 50-year low of just 3.5%.
Just as significantly, employee wages jumped by an impressive 3.1% from the previous year.
Meanwhile, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced in its annual Revenue Statistics report that the U.S. tax…