Jack Fields: “the White House believes that the Government, rather than the private sector, should run every health care program. And…”

“the White House believes that the Government, rather than the private sector, should run every health care program. And this is certainly the case with the Medicare prescription drug benefit. The President proposes taking private sector managed drug plans that works well now for retirees, dismantling them, replacing them with a few thousand bureaucrats, a few hundred pages of Federal regulation, and hundreds of complicated forms, and seeing if they can get it to work as well as the private sector plans now do. Not only is this a terrible waste of the taxpayer's money and a threat to a thriving drug industry, it is also disruptive for the retiree who now has drug benefits through the retiree health or Medigap plan. The most outrageous part of this proposal is that although it is being advanced as a way to control drug costs, it will create havoc with the very activities now successfully controlling drug costs in the private market. To begin with, pharmaceuticals are one of the greatest industrial success stories in this country. They have grown as a major export product for the United States--worldwide sales reached nearly $85 billion in 1993, nearly four times what they were in 1980--and as a major source of R&D, spending over $10 billion on R&D last year alone. Competition in this country is intense, and that competition has brought remarkable medical advances in the last decade alone.…”