Viewpoints: Shutdown Only Delayed; Politics And Drug Prices; Failing Co-Ops
A selection of opinions on health care from around the country.
Politico:
We’ll Still Have A Shutdown
House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation last Friday steeply reduced the likelihood there will be a government shutdown this week but precipitously increased the possibility of a shutdown in December. ... In the immediate aftermath of Boehner’s decision to leave—which the Freedom Caucus considers the biggest victory of its relatively short existence — it has already made threats about what will happen to the members of the GOP House leadership if Planned Parenthood funding is allowed to continue or if the current caps on federal spending are lifted. If the new speaker is unable to work out a compromise on those issues, a shutdown is far more likely than not. (Stan Collender, 9/28)
The Washington Post:
Carly Fiorina’s Ultraconservative Rage
[Republican presidential candidate Carly] Fiorina, however, is all about specificity. During the debate this month, she created an electric moment when she went after Planned Parenthood. Glaring into the camera, she challenged Democrats to view the sting videos taken by antiabortion activists and “watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” One problem: No such video exists. To be precise, I should say that no one has been able to find such footage and Fiorina refuses to produce it. (Eugene Robinson, 9/28)
The Wall Street Journal:
The Biotech Rout
Health-care stocks suffered an ugly tumble on Monday, dragging down the overall Dow Jones Industrial Average by nearly 2%. The selloff was particularly marked in biotech, with Nasdaq’s industry index plunging 6%, extending a 13% drop last week, and erasing all gains so far this year, as the nearby chart shows. Thus does politics injure the real economy. Analysts attributed the slide to a letter that socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and House Democrats sent Monday to Valeant Pharmaceuticals threatening a subpoena and demanding the drug maker justify price increases for two heart rhythm medications. Valeant shares were off 17% for the day. The letter illustrates the larger problem of growing political hostility to drug research and development. (9/28)
Bloomberg:
Hillary Clinton Fixes Sights On Ripe Target: Prescription Drug Prices
Hillary Clinton may have found the perfect target to show that she'll be as tough on corporations as her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders: big pharma. Following up on her tweet last week against "price-gouging" by Turing Pharmaceuticals that sent biotech stocks plummeting, the Democratic front-runner released a hard-hitting television ad on Monday suggesting that CEO Mark Shkreli decided to lower prices after she went after him. In between, she unveiled a proposal to cap out-of-pocket drug expenses, offering tax credits to help families deal with soaring costs, forcing drug manufacturers to invest more on research and development, and obliging companies to invest in the production of generics. The response from industry has been, to say the least, unenthusiastic. (David Knowles, 9/29)
Bloomberg:
Clinton's Plan To Mess Up Prescription Economics
Hillary Clinton thinks drug development should be riskier, and less profitable. Also, your health insurance premiums should be higher. And there should be fewer drugs available. This is not, of course, how the Clinton campaign would put it. The official line is that Americans are just paying too darn much for drugs, and she has a plan to stop that. (Megan McArdle, 9/28)
The New York Times' The Upshot:
How Patent Law Can Block Even Lifesaving Drugs
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s prescription drug policy proposal, released last week, would hold drug manufacturers accountable to their level of investment in research. But there are some potentially valuable drugs we’ll never get drug companies to invest in — those that cannot be patented. By granting temporary monopolies to innovators, the patent system is widely credited with protecting and promoting innovation. But when it comes to pharmaceuticals, it may be preventing valuable therapies from coming to market. (Austin Frakt, 9/28)
Bloomberg:
Obamacare's Nonprofit Insurers Are Failing, Predictably
The co-ops do not have the kind of massive capital reserves that [insurance] incumbents can use to survive a few years of mispricing. The temporary programs the law contains to help smooth out these issues turned out to be less generous than expected after Republicans insisted they be made revenue-neutral, and at any rate, they were set to expire. So it’s not exactly an enormous surprise to see the co-ops starting to drop out. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't matter that much; the program was not central to Obamacare .... But this story is still worth noting because it highlights one of the central fallacies of the entire Obamacare debate: the belief, cherished by most people, that there is a magic pot of money somewhere in the health care system that can be painlessly tapped to provide people cheaper, better health care. (Megan McArdle, 9/28)
The Washington Post:
Bill Gates And The Golden Age Of Global Aid
The billionaire’s main contribution to global health is the manner in which he combines technology, aspiration, resources and rigor. It is the same approach that has chased the polio virus across the world to its redoubts in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Michael Gerson, 9/28)
The San Antonio Express-News:
Planned Parenthood Provides Crucial Health Care For Many Latinas
Texas needs Planned Parenthood. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Texas has one of the country’s highest rates of teen pregnancies. In 2011, Texas had the fifth-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. We need organizations like Planned Parenthood to discuss family planning and provide information on contraception and sex education to young people in need. Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas has served this need and has helped to reduce the number of unplanned teen pregnancies. (Lourdes Galvan, 9/28)
Los Angeles Times:
In Consolidating County's Three Health Agencies, Don't Repeat Mistakes Of The Past
It became abundantly clear in January that the Board of Supervisors, without the benefit or bother of public input, was intent on consolidating three Los Angeles County health departments into a kind of superagency. After the supervisors voted to pursue such a merger, The Times unearthed a "confidential" memo to each of them from Department of Health Services Director Mitchell Katz, laying out the case for combining the departments of mental health and public health with Katz's department, which chiefly handles public hospitals and clinics. "In response to your request," the memo began, suggesting a discussion that had already been moving forward secretly — and unlawfully, because such policy moves are and ought to be subject to the scrutiny of professionals who provide services, patients who use them and taxpayers who pay the bill. (9/27)
