In response the sharp rebuke of Obamacare sent by voters in Missouri, Senator Harry Reid says that voters in Missouri just don’t know enough about the new law yet and when they do, they will change their minds. Well Senator, Missouri is after all the Show Me State and apparently Missourians don’t like what they have seen so far.
The simple truth is: You can’t get something for nothing and someone has the pay the bill. Nothing in Obamacare creates more health care. It is merely injects government into the equation in order to take what we have currently and redistribute it. So naturally, the government will need to find ways to cut costs.
Soon to be former director of the OMB, Peter Orzag believes that we can save money “…if costly new medical services were adopted more selectively in the future than they have been in the past, and if the diffusion of existing costly services was slowed. ”
Well, how does the government go about doing that? How do they tell people that a life saving or life extending treatment exists, but it just costs too much so patients can’t have it?
Well, they don’t. They utilize control over the system to manipulate the availability of the treatment and then lead people to believe that it just doesn’t work. Problem solved.
We’ve already begun to see this operation in action with the FDA’s recent attempts to de-label the cancer drug Avastin for use with Stage 4 breast cancer patients.
The FDA was created and designed to protect citizens from products that are inherently unsafe or that make claims of effectiveness that cannot be substantiated. There is no authority to consider drug pricing when evaluating a drug.
There is no debate that patients who have taken the drug enjoy an extended life span. The FDA even admits that the average time with tumor progression on the drug is nearly six months and that follow-up studies have shown no new side effects.
So in the case of Avastin, cost is clearly the factor leading them to consider de-labeling.
The bottom line is that pricing will soon become a key if not determining factor into whether a drug is covered all in an effort to “lower the cost of health care.”
And the FDA will be a crucial skirt behind which weak-kneed politicians will hide.
While Senator Reid believes that people will like the new law once they learn more about it, we beg to differ. Quite the contrary — the more people know about what’s in the bill the more they don’t like it. Missouri is showing us the way to fight back.