November 9, 2010--Free Market Antibiotics
Now that the fun part is over--criticizing Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and the media--Republicans have gained control of the House of Representatives and almost equal standing in the Senate and it is thus time for them to participate in governing. Especially to take significant responsibility for the lagging economy.
By now we know the mantra--cut taxes and slash spending.
The tax part is easy--eliminate the estate tax and maintain the tax levels of the Bush administration. Forget that many in the Tea Party would cut them even more. GOP leaders would settle for the current status quo. No matter that doing so would continue to maintain income and wealth inequality not seen since the last Gilded Age since the main beneficiaries of the current tax system are the nation's richest 2 percent and would add trillions to the deficit. If one believes with almost religious fervor, against all evidence, that reducing taxes will lead to trickle-down prosperity, one half of the GOP economic agenda is clear and simple.
On the other hand, when it comes to spending, after the rhetoric dissipates, when it comes time to decide just where to make cuts, things get a lot trickier.
Spending on entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security and defense eats up about 85 percent of the current budget and that then means that over time trillions would need to be eliminated from the budgets for education (student loans are a marquis example), veterans (their hospitals are not part of the defense budget), highways (most that is spent for these comes from federal as opposed to state budgets), unemployment insurance, the national forests and parks (unless of course one wants to cut down the remaining trees), the FBI and federal courts (including the salaries of favorite Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia), Homeland Security, FEMA, and science and health research (particularly that which involves stem cells).
GOP members of Congress would also have to eliminate their own taxpayer-paid-for perks--their gyms, subsidized restaurants in the Capital, their barber shops, travel junkets, pensions, and over-generous health care plans. They after all are also government employees and at our expense hypocritically live quite sumptuously.
No wonder then that when victorious Republicans have been questioned this past week about what they would actually cut, we hear a lot of hemming and hawing.
My favorite example, because it hits close to all of our homes and represents a microcosm of how difficult it is to reduce the federal budget without radical and unpopular decision-making, is the call to end federal subsidies for pharmaceutical research. The thinking behind this is that since the drug companies exist within the larger context of capitalism, they are neither entitled to government assistance nor need taxpayer support since the profit motive guides the blind hand of the free prescription drug market.
But, the New York Times reports, left to their own for-profit devices, America's pharmaceutical companies would rather look for the next erectile dysfunction pill than new antibiotics because that's where the big money is. (Article linked below.)
It costs much more in research and FDA-required testing to find and get approval for a new Erythromycin than a new anti-anxiety pill. And the market for these is much, much greater than for any antibiotic.
If you are not familiar with the reasons we need to add to our pharmacopeia of antibiotics it is largely because many killer bacteria, through mutations largely caused by the over-use of current medications, have become more and more resistant to virtually all existing drugs.
For example, doctors are discovering that a newly-discovered mutation, NDM-1, which renders deadly germs such as E coli invulnerable to nearly all current antibiotics, is spreading rapidly. And about 100,000 deaths a year occur in American hospitals from infections such as MRSA that are resistant to most antibiotics.
From a drug company perspective 100,000 patients is a small number and so there is no financial incentive for them to do all the hard and expensive work required to develop effective new drugs. To make the huge profits that their shareholders demand, from a cost-benefit way of doing business, it only makes sense to invest in searching for drugs that can be sold by the multi-millions. Without federal support, it is unlikely that we will see the discovery of the low-batch drugs needed to fight many killer diseases.
Henry Waxman, departing chairman of the House committee that deals with federal issues of this kind, has seen a role for the federal government in the development of new antibiotics, from tax breaks to drug companies to extending the patent life for effective drugs to government guaranteed purchases. Waxman is hoping that with the GOP takeover of the House there will continue to be bipartisan support for congressional action of this kind.
But since subsidizing pharmaceutical companies costs money, he is concerned that federal support for basic health research will wind up on the cutting room floor. Unless John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, God forbid, contract MRSA or E coli from the hamburgers they serve in the Senate cafeteria.
By now we know the mantra--cut taxes and slash spending.
The tax part is easy--eliminate the estate tax and maintain the tax levels of the Bush administration. Forget that many in the Tea Party would cut them even more. GOP leaders would settle for the current status quo. No matter that doing so would continue to maintain income and wealth inequality not seen since the last Gilded Age since the main beneficiaries of the current tax system are the nation's richest 2 percent and would add trillions to the deficit. If one believes with almost religious fervor, against all evidence, that reducing taxes will lead to trickle-down prosperity, one half of the GOP economic agenda is clear and simple.
On the other hand, when it comes to spending, after the rhetoric dissipates, when it comes time to decide just where to make cuts, things get a lot trickier.
Spending on entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security and defense eats up about 85 percent of the current budget and that then means that over time trillions would need to be eliminated from the budgets for education (student loans are a marquis example), veterans (their hospitals are not part of the defense budget), highways (most that is spent for these comes from federal as opposed to state budgets), unemployment insurance, the national forests and parks (unless of course one wants to cut down the remaining trees), the FBI and federal courts (including the salaries of favorite Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia), Homeland Security, FEMA, and science and health research (particularly that which involves stem cells).
GOP members of Congress would also have to eliminate their own taxpayer-paid-for perks--their gyms, subsidized restaurants in the Capital, their barber shops, travel junkets, pensions, and over-generous health care plans. They after all are also government employees and at our expense hypocritically live quite sumptuously.
No wonder then that when victorious Republicans have been questioned this past week about what they would actually cut, we hear a lot of hemming and hawing.
My favorite example, because it hits close to all of our homes and represents a microcosm of how difficult it is to reduce the federal budget without radical and unpopular decision-making, is the call to end federal subsidies for pharmaceutical research. The thinking behind this is that since the drug companies exist within the larger context of capitalism, they are neither entitled to government assistance nor need taxpayer support since the profit motive guides the blind hand of the free prescription drug market.
But, the New York Times reports, left to their own for-profit devices, America's pharmaceutical companies would rather look for the next erectile dysfunction pill than new antibiotics because that's where the big money is. (Article linked below.)
It costs much more in research and FDA-required testing to find and get approval for a new Erythromycin than a new anti-anxiety pill. And the market for these is much, much greater than for any antibiotic.
If you are not familiar with the reasons we need to add to our pharmacopeia of antibiotics it is largely because many killer bacteria, through mutations largely caused by the over-use of current medications, have become more and more resistant to virtually all existing drugs.
For example, doctors are discovering that a newly-discovered mutation, NDM-1, which renders deadly germs such as E coli invulnerable to nearly all current antibiotics, is spreading rapidly. And about 100,000 deaths a year occur in American hospitals from infections such as MRSA that are resistant to most antibiotics.
From a drug company perspective 100,000 patients is a small number and so there is no financial incentive for them to do all the hard and expensive work required to develop effective new drugs. To make the huge profits that their shareholders demand, from a cost-benefit way of doing business, it only makes sense to invest in searching for drugs that can be sold by the multi-millions. Without federal support, it is unlikely that we will see the discovery of the low-batch drugs needed to fight many killer diseases.
Henry Waxman, departing chairman of the House committee that deals with federal issues of this kind, has seen a role for the federal government in the development of new antibiotics, from tax breaks to drug companies to extending the patent life for effective drugs to government guaranteed purchases. Waxman is hoping that with the GOP takeover of the House there will continue to be bipartisan support for congressional action of this kind.
But since subsidizing pharmaceutical companies costs money, he is concerned that federal support for basic health research will wind up on the cutting room floor. Unless John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, God forbid, contract MRSA or E coli from the hamburgers they serve in the Senate cafeteria.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:57 AM
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