A neutral study of the soaring costs of prescription drugs finds that … the problem is not price-gouging. The report from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, reported in the New York Times, said “that 42 percent [of the rise in costs] was attributable to an increase in the number of prescriptions written by doctors and filled by pharmacies. At the same time, it said, a shift toward the use of more expensive drugs accounted for 36 percent of the overall increase in spending, while price increases accounted for the remaining 22 percent.” Simply put, this means that most of the cost pressure comes from demand for the newest and best treatments available, which inevitably cost more than older, generic or post-patent medications. The lesson of the study? If we fund a prescription drug benefit for seniors under Medicare, we may as well kiss our fiscal future goodbye. The Bush administration is trying to handle this simply by under-funding this new entitlement. That won’t work. What we need is a full-scale political effort to derail the entitlement altogether. Link the biggest generation in history with the fastest rising cost in our society right now – and you’ve got a fiscal calamity waiting to happen.
THE POST CREAMS THE TIMES: Wanna read a smart, balanced, serious editorial on the U.N. Human Rights Commission mess? Try the Washington Post, increasingly leaving the tired boilerplate of the New York Times’ editorials in the dust.
The Dish 