Senator Charles Schumer has concluded that Merck's plan to lower the price of Zocor is "anti-competitive."
Senator John Kerry is not the only Francophile socialist in the upper ranks of Democratic Party policy-makers. New York's Senator Charles Schumer, the author of filibusters to prevent Senate consideration of judicial nominees, is zealous to protect consumers against Merck's plan to price one of its drugs below the generic drug price. He has written the Federal Trade Commission to declare: "I find this practice highly disturbing and anticompetitive."
It's anticompetitive to compete with generic drug manufacturers when the result is lower prices for consumers? According to Yahoo News,
A New York senator accused the drug giant Merck & Co. [last week] of conspiring to undercut a cheaper generic alternative to its cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor just days before it becomes available to patients.
Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat, charged that Merck is quietly collaborating with health insurance companies to create lower copays for customers buying Zocor than for those buying the generic equivalent.
Now this all makes sense if you view it from the socialist perspective.
The Senator apparently believes that you and I are not able to make decisions on our own. We need the nurturing support of hundreds of pages of Federal regulations to tell us what not to do and what to do.
Remember that President Clinton opposed tax cuts in his first term, because, he said, people would spend the money on the wrong things.
The French connection was explained by Alexis de Tocqueville. In Democracy in America, he wrote that French socialism is a system under which no village is too small to have at least one official from Paris whose duty is to prevent any sort of local initiative.
Since the Revolution of 1789, French intellectuals, the government, and a good part of the citizenry have perceived market competition as barbaric, uncivilized conduct.
Their religion, socialism, decrees that competition arises from private ownership of property, which is the genesis of society's crime and war. A civilized society like that of France will leave prices and availabilities to the elite graduates of the Hautes Ecoles, who are the only ones qualified to plan how people are to live.
Remember O’ Brien’s lecture to Winston Smith in
1984: power is the goal, power for its own sake.
These people care not about precription drugs or
competition. They only want power, and in whatever
increments power is available, no matter how small.
How essential is Zocor? Is it a miracle drug? It doesn’t
really matter, because if a Democratic senator can
fool with the price of a cholesterol-lowering drug,
the same senator or his buddies can put a stranglehold
on any real miracle drugs that come about. But who
is the more foolish? This fool, or the fools who
elected him?
Isn’t that SO TYPICAL of politicians? There is a “problem”, the market responds to address it humanely and successfully, and some disruptive and ignorant political jobber rushes in to gum up the works in the name of doing “good”. After President Bush’s “prescription durg reform” sent drug prices skyrocketing, and threw medicare-insurance into a turmoil, the market (buyers and sellers) responded reasonably enough by ordering the medications form Canada at a lower price (and comparable if not higher quality). Of course the Feds could not leave well enough alone, so they passed import restrictions! The Canadian government also passed export restrictions at their end!
The market (again, buyers and sellers) turned to the internet! Again the government gums up the works, with all manner of intrusive couterproductive, and just-plain-stupid regulations interfering with internet sales and deliveries, making the problem of drug overcharges worse and creating a whole slew of new problems as well!
Senator Schumer, don’t be so good to us! LEAVE US ALONE!!
If you and your fellow lawmakers want to do something humane and benevolent for your constituents, then use your good offices to push for legislation getting your government out of the way, especially in limiting the runaway powers of the FDA, repeal your import and export controls that are costing us so much money, and we can take it from there!
PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller
Schumer is the consummate socialist. Socialism =Communism with a happy face. Still, I think everyone will agree medicine and higher education rising 20% a year has collusion, monoply, and extortion written all over it. Mr. Meller may be on to something. Still, competition may not work here because we need medicine and education to prosper, so both industries, whose first priority is profit, have no incentive to change. Are medicine and education professions or do we treat them as vocations, demanding people be put before profit? I am genuinely torn here. Additional comments are welcome.
Profit being the motive is the engine of change I would say. Competition and the marketing of better more efficient drugs or education or whatever is what makes capitalism the most moral of economic choices. Give the consumers as many choices as possible and continually improve your products so they will buy them. Put all the information and choices available out there and let people decide what is best for them in their own lives. Keep the nanny state nabobs far far away.
Leave it to the wonderful senior senator of my state (and libs in general) to find something wrong with a drug company’s effort to help people and earn profits at the same time. So much for them being for the little guy. I hope that all of you that are from NYS remember this come election time. The bottom line for him and others lf his ilk is simply this:
Corporataions bad, government good.