Government Regulation Might Contribute To Rising Health Care Costs

See The Soaring Cost of a Simple Breath by ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. From the NY Times, 10-13-13. The price of asthma inhalers has been rising. As you can see below, there are a couple of ways in which government contributes to the rise. Part of it is due to the lobbying of corporations. But this just points to the "capture theory" of regulation. Government regulators are captured by the businesses they are supposed to regulate because those companies have such a strong incentive to alter what government does, unlike the average person. Excerpt:

"Unlike other countries, where the government directly or indirectly sets an allowed national wholesale price for each drug, the United States leaves prices to market competition among pharmaceutical companies, including generic drug makers. But competition is often a mirage in today’s health care arena — a surprising number of lifesaving drugs are made by only one manufacturer — and businesses often successfully blunt market forces.

Asthma inhalers, for example, are protected by strings of patents — for pumps, delivery systems and production processes — that are hard to skirt to make generic alternatives, even when the medicines they contain are old, as they almost all are.

The repatenting of older drugs like some birth control pills, insulin and colchicine, the primary treatment for gout, has rendered medicines that once cost pennies many times more expensive.

“The increases are stunning, and it’s very injurious to patients,” said Dr. Robert Morrow, a family practitioner in the Bronx. “Colchicine is a drug you could find in Egyptian mummies.”

Pharmaceutical companies also buttress high prices by choosing to sell a medicine by prescription, rather than over the counter, so that insurers cover a price tag that would be unacceptable to consumers paying full freight. They even pay generic drug makers not to produce cut-rate competitors in a controversial scheme called pay for delay.

Thanks in part to the $250 million last year spent on lobbying for pharmaceutical and health products — more than even the defense industry — the government allows such practices. Lawmakers in Washington have forbidden Medicare, the largest government purchaser of health care, to negotiate drug prices. Unlike its counterparts in other countries, the United States Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which evaluates treatments for coverage by federal programs, is not allowed to consider cost comparisons or cost-effectiveness in its recommendations. And importation of prescription medicines from abroad is illegal (which was probably done to "protect" the consumer-CM), even personal purchases from mail-order pharmacies."