The government should not pay for prescription drugs for its people, but rather people should pay for their own prescription drugs. Insisting that the government should pay for prescription drugs is like asking the wolf to guard the hen house, and completely undermines a free market system.
The United States Food and Drug Administration (USDA) carefully holds all pharmaceutical companies to stringent standards in the development and manufacture of prescription medications. In fact, the USDA is the reason the cost of these medications soars to unreachable heights for so many people. However, that is the price of safety. Governments, particularly ours, are motivated by the almighty dollar. If they are put in charge of both regulating the development and manufacture of the drugs AND paying the price at the end for all that developing and manufacturing, safety will suffer as regulations are relaxed to lower the end price.
Currently, it takes approximately seven years for a pharmaceutical company to get a completed medication to market due to the stranglehold the USDA has on them, and this is after all the money they’ve spent on research and development. Can you imagine having a life-saving device you’ve spent millions inventing and patenting only to have to warehouse your inventory for seven years before being allowed to sell it? A simple solution to that problem would be privatization of the regulatory system-not socialized medicine.
In our free market system, time and experience has proven that anything a governmental agency can accomplish, the private sector can accomplish cheaper, more effectively, and more efficiently. UPS is a perfect example. The United States Postal Service took millions upon millions of dollars of government money to work on developing an overnight postal delivery service only to come back later and say it was impossible. UPS came on the scene, a private sector company, and the rest is history; cheaper, more effective, more efficient.
The moment the government begins paying for prescription medication, the quality and quantity of available new medications will wither and die. Inevitably, the government will set prices on these medications in order to serve its own interests, severely limiting the pharmaceutical company’s ability to recoup their investment in research and development and the long wait to get their drug through USDA approval and into consumers’ hands. Without the motivation of actually making a profit, why would companies invest in new medications to begin with? Once that problem presents itself, a domino effect will occur in which the government decides it now must get involved with research and development of new drugs, and then we’re back to the original problem of the government trying to regulate itself.
Asking the government to pay for prescription drugs for its citizens will undermine the concept of a free society, and a free marketplace. The cost of freedom is personal responsibility. For every piece of that responsibility citizens serve up on a platter to their government, a piece of freedom is sacrificed, as well.
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