The Biden administration and its co-conspirators, congressional Democrats, have been busy wrecking America these last 18 months.
They launched a war on American energy, shutting down the Keystone pipeline and blocking domestic oil and gas exploration — resulting in skyrocketing gas prices, less fuel to heat and cool homes and businesses, and the sorry spectacle of an American president going gas-can-in-hand to beg foreign despots and dictators to supply us with some energy.
They launched a war on our sovereignty and national security by inviting illegal immigrants (and smugglers) to “come on in.” Through our open borders has come a tidal wave of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs now killing Americans all over the country.
They launched a war on education — keeping schools closed while children suffered mentally and emotionally.
And they launched a war on our Constitution, using executive orders to expand a regulatory state that threatens to suffocate individual autonomy and business innovation. Their legislation-through-regulation schemes are an end run around the people’s representatives — and therefore, around the people.
Then there is their reckless spending, triggering the highest inflation we’ve seen since the 1970s and lowering living standards for all Americans, hitting hardest those least able to afford it.
And now, to distract us from the wreckage and in a last-ditch effort to save their jobs in 2022, Democrats want to do what they do best: spend more taxpayer money. To pay for a portion of this spending, they would command drug companies to “negotiate” with Medicare on prices for certain brand-name drugs. “Negotiation” is a misnomer, however; if drug companies don’t agree with the government’s price, they would lose most of the revenue from those drugs’ sales. Congressional Democrats and their allies in the White House are determined to wreck our best-in-the-world health care system in much the same fashion as they’ve wrecked American energy, national security, education and constitutional governance.
Pharmaceuticals cost billions to develop, and many never make it to market. Continued investment in developing new drugs happens only because research and development pays off from time to time in the form of a “blockbuster” drug that makes billions — and covers the R&D costs of the once-promising drugs that didn’t pan out. Even the tantalizing possibility of developing a best-selling drug will not be enough to attract investment when the government can step in, dictate the price, and take away the profit that would have covered R&D losses. Undercutting this potential for profit means that capital will go elsewhere. Government cannot stop that, unless, of course, we abandon the free market and adopt a socialist economic system, which many on the left are clamoring for and which would explain why they seem determined to wreck our country.
Lower investment in the pharma sector means, of course, that the promise of many potential drugs will never be explored. Who knows what cures will never be developed — Would it have been for Alzheimer’s? Or pancreatic cancer? Or Parkinson’s?
There are problems in our health care system that need to be addressed. But destroying the sector that has given so many of our citizens life-saving treatments and cures — especially to pay for more government spending and bureaucratic programs — is most certainly not the answer.
Beverly McKittrick is the director of the Regulatory Action Center (RAC) at FreedomWorks. Previously, she served in the Trump administration at the Department of Labor, Office of the Secretary.