Santorum: Make Medicine Cheaper ... with Markets

I was roughly THIS unimpressed when I saw the clip.

If you haven't already gathered, I watch The Rachel Maddow Show as a podcast, so I'm usually a day or two behind. Beyond filling the time, it's a decent way to keep my fingers on the pulse of American politics, which the CBC refuses to cover... along with most everything else. Yesterday, I was watching her video for February 2nd (which I missed, understandably), and she opened with news about the National Prayer Breakfast.

The thing with Doctor Maddow is that she's unusually anti-religion for someone with a D. Phil. from Oxford (though, admittedly, her studies were politics, not philosophy itself). So when she started on with the Prayer Breakfast being "creepy" and its connections to C-Street (which, admittedly, is actually kind of creepy), I sort of expected her to rail against the breakfast. I was thinking "Oh, My God, a liberal icon is about to implode on national television". I should have known better. She turned the topic around onto something that President Obama said during the breakfast about how faith informs his policy decisions - that his position on increasing taxation for the rich to pay for support of the poor is consistent with Christ's teaching on the rich-poor divide (see: Matthew 19), which is a position I agree with, and evidently she did too.

Rick Santorum is a Republican presidential hopeful who probably won't get the candidacy, both because: (a)in largely-protestant America, he's predicating his run on his supposedly strong Catholic faith, and (b)what happens when you google his surname. Of all the major republican candidates, he's the one who thumps his bible the loudest, despite apparently sharing a fundamental non-understanding of the text with the majority of the economic right.

At a campaign stop (is that the term? "Audience" seems almost more appropriate) Mr. Santorum was asked, by a small child (likely put up by his parents - the roping of children into politics is something I can't stand), if he can't "do something to make medicine cheaper" because people "can't afford it". Mr. Santorum's decision was exactly what you expect to hear from economically-right politicians: "The way you make medicine cheaper is with Markets".

I'm not an economist. I have grade average of 68% in about 4 credit-hours of Microeconomics, and no formal macroeconomics training. In full fairness, neither is Mister Santorum. His argument, that pharmaceutical companies in a free market would compete for the lowest price, is absurd. Pharmacy is not a high-margin industry in its current state. Research and Development budgets eat quite a bit out of the per-pill revenue. The expensive drugs aren't the well-established ones like painkillers or anti-depressants. These are the advanced multiple-sclerosis drugs, the cancer treatments, the complex HIV-suppressing multi-drug cocktails. The ones that don't quite work properly, and always need tuning. Tuning means higher overhead. Higher overhead means less room to lower prices. Which is what subsidies and quotas are for.

I say you can't have privatized medicine and affordable medicine at the same time. You don't have to nationalize the industry. You just have to regulate it. Keep things moving. Provide state subsidies for high-cost drugs. Cap it, if you have to. But the purpose of a country is to provide a net benefit for the people who live in it. That's the only reason why a state should collect taxes, after all: For the people, by the people, and all that.

The above photo isn't really my reaction to the video. It's a frame pulled from footage of a lecture, before I had time to turn my camera around and aim it at the lecturer.