Month: September 2009

This Is The Blogosphere On Drugs, Ctd

A reader writes:

The problem with Megan's position is that the demand curve for drugs is vertical, or nearly vertical.  Sick people will consume only the quantity they need to stay alive/healthy, but will pay any price for that.  If pricing was left up to the market, supply and demand for patented, life-saving drugs would reach equilibrium at about 100% of the consumer's assets, plus five years of indentured servitude.  Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it would be ugly. 

I take this personally.  I have narcolepsy, a rare disease, and only one company manufactures the drug I need (Xyrem).  It's an "orphan" drug: The monopoly is the government's incentive to make it available, otherwise no company would find the R&D investment worthwhile, given the small number of patients.  However, without insurance, my monthly drug costs would be greater than my monthly earnings.  What does Megan think about this?

"If people, in their role as consumers, decide that the new pharmaceuticals coming out aren't worth their price, and decline to buy them, I like that too."

What really bothers me is that medicine is literally the Econ 101 textbook example of vertical demand curves.  How does Megan not know this?

More Polish Than The Poles?

The neocons are hyper-ventilating about a stupid missile shield that few people thought made sense in the first place. They act as if Russia is the Soviet Union and Poland is still being run from Moscow. They completely ignore the fact that this clearly makes Israel safer. In the real world, outside neocon fantasy, actual people have moved on from the 1980s. Ben Smith 373646

Yes: a clear plurality of Poles support being "abandoned" by the US to the claws of the Russian bear. Or, in non neocon-speak: the Poles have long since stopped thinking like the neocons. Almost everybody has. Except the Republican right.

Dear President Bush

Bush-torture-wide

A reader writes:

The only thing missing from your letter to President Bush is the cc to his father. Although the first President Bush kept his distance from the decisions his son, as his own president, was making, there is now time for a father-to-son talk. I find it difficult to believe that the elder Bush is not having much of the same difficulty coming to terms with the torture-and-abuse program instituted under his son's administration.

Another adds:

Conciliatory? Well, I take you at your word, but I have to say my own take on your open letter was quite different.

What I saw was the final summation of a very fine attorney — an attorney for the defense of this nation and our deepest values. It was a summation made not to a jury and a courtroom, but to everyone in the nation, and to history; a summation made in the clear knowledge that no actual indictments will ever be brought against these men in the real world, no verdicts entered, no sentences handed down. It was left to the power of the pen and the pixel to render judgment — which you did, brilliantly. Methodically. Inescapably. If you truly think that was "conciliatory", you need to have your head examined. It was devastating.

You indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced them all in one grand piece. Was it constructive? Oh, yes. Clarity and courage are the sine qua nons of true creativity. And you did something more — you released us. What needed to be said — for all of us — was said. Now we can go on.

So, conciliatory? I know what you mean, and it was an important, even critical component of your approach — but no, I just can't agree. Constructive? Very.

A Poem For Friday


It’s good for the ego, when I call and they come
running, squawking and clucking, because it’s feedtime,
and once again I can’t resist picking up little Lazarus,
an orange-and-white pullet I adore. “Yes, yes, everything will be
okay,” I say to her glaring mongrel face. Come September,
she’ll begin to lay the blue-green eggs I love poached.
God dooms the snake to taste nothing but the dust
and the hen to 4,000 or so ovulations. Poor Lazarus—
last spring an intruder murdered her sisters and left her
garroted in the coop. There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

– Henri Cole, “Hens”.