SB 2031 Continues Path to Prescription Drug Price Controls
SB 2031 Continues Path to Prescription Drug Price Controls
The interim healthcare committee approved and has introduced a bill that sets North Dakota on a path to socialistic price controls.
“There ought to be a law!” and “We have to do something!”
Those are two sentences that advocates of smaller government hate to hear, especially when said by typically conservative lawmakers.
But that seems to be the motivation behind SB 2031 that has been introduced for the 2023 Legislative Session.
As we reported back in 2021, there has been an effort to move North Dakota down the road of using the power of state government to control prices in the prescription drug market.
The jist of this bill is to create a pilot program for the State Insurance Commissioner to be put in the position of negotiating with drug makers to lower prices for retired state employees. (If the pilot program “works” it is presumed it would be expanded.
One question that should be raised is: wouldn’t it be better to negotiate a deal with the health insurance company that provides all state employees with health insurance, and create a side-benefit for retirees that way? - sort of our North Dakota’s own version of Medicare Part D. It would seem that it would be easier for an existing insurance company to negotiate and cover these costs than trying to invent a new process and new bureaucracies to put the state’s insurance commissioner in charge of drug prices.
The most egregious feature of this bill is that it attempts to normalize deferring North Dakota policies to the policies of Canada. (Bernie Sanders would love this idea!)
Even more amazing is that recently, North Dakota State University published a paper regarding the dangers of pharmaceutical price controls.
We are expending tax dollars to develop academic research at our publically funded universities showing that these are bad policies - but yet some legislators want to push forward.
Who is behind this effort?
If you drive around Bismarck, you will see billboards like this:
The North Dakota chapter of AARP is the driving force behind this effort as their website explains.
Which is their right to do so, and their intentions to reduce drug prices are not wrong - but this approach is terribly misguided and we should expect Republican legislators to know better.
It is unclear whether the interim committee’s approval of this bill was “all for show”, regardless, your legislators need to be reminded that price controls lead to a path toward socialized medicine - something Republicans used to be against.
North Dakota Republicans never been through Republicans since I moved here in 2000. The majority of the state's laws on any particular topic actually, our socialist in nature or actions. Not to mention the corrupt bed attorney general put every state agency under his control. The new attorney general is nothing but a shoe in. Status quo all the way. Even the attorney general's BCI is a secret law enforcement agency that is not transparent to the public and only answer to the attorney general. Any complaints go to the attorney general. I know this is not on the prescription drug subject but this subject is really in essence no different than anything else I would say package to try to gain control of. By the way, don't make an enemy of the attorney general or is gestapo BCI, they never forgive and they will haunt you even 20 years later when they were wrong in the first place. Constitutional revision needs to take place in this state. That includes everything including the supreme court. There's nothing really wrong with the supreme Court except the way the system is set up they send their decisions that reverses a judge's order right back to the district judge who, in contempt of the supreme court, issues his unlawful order again. The entire system here needs to change and agencies need to be independent of the attorney general's office including the colleges and universities. The attorney general has too much power and can be a dictator, he definitely has the power to do it. It doesn't matter what legislature does, it doesn't matter what the law says, it doesn't matter what the Constitution says. The attorney general's office in the state of North Dakota has way too much power and it needs to be broken up and restructured.
The 1-page summary cited in this article, from an NDSU faculty member, used citations to prove their point while not actually stating why lowering drug prices would be bad for both consumers and producers. The rhetoric is there, "economic lesson applies to all products in all markets" shows exactly the mentality of the writer with little substantive support. You essentially are saying "it's bad because it's bad because socialism." Thank you for the dose of neoliberalism. I'll just keep watching corporate news to reinforce this faulty logic.
Where was the support for the argument that Colorado's insulin price cap law is bad for consumers? If a person is getting life-sustaining medication for a reduced price then that is a gain for the consumer. That is the goal of medicine: to help the patient.
Update: So, the problem is limiting price controls limits research and development for that drug and for related drugs. What it also limits is profit for that company for a drug that has a price control on it. The fundamental problem, then, is the ability for a company to maintain its infrastructure and business in order to continue to thrive. The real problem and culprit once again comes back to the seeking of profit for shareholders at the expense of the stakeholders. Give me "late stage capitalism" for $400, Alex.