The Pharmaceutical Companies

Mitt Romney asks John McCain "don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys." McCain deadpans back: "they are." That, I think, was the old John McCain who people liked. The context was McCain's call for reimportation of drugs from Canada.

This is followed by a commercial break and then when we come back the King of Straight Talk winds up doing some immigration pandering. "I've never supported amnesty," says the lead Republican sponsor of a Senate amnesty bill.

UPDATE: Ponnuru gets an email from a rival campaign noting a 2003 news account in which McCain explains that "Amnesty has to be an important part because there are people who have lived in this country for 20, 30 or 40 years, who have raised children here and pay taxes here and are not citizens. That has to be a component of it."

Comments

Plus, did you see his angry, grumpy handwaving after someone else started talking to his question?

Posted by d | January 5, 2008 8:11 PM

I'd love to hear what Sullivan would say about Big Pharma Straight Talk like that.

Posted by Consumatopia | January 5, 2008 8:14 PM

So calling various Third World thugs "evildoers" is simplistic and Manichean, but demonizing drug companies is straight talk.

Fact is you have to pay for research and development and regulatory compliance somehow. And you have to compensate for risk. If everyone did as Canada does, the rate of innovation would stall and more people will die younger.

Posted by Pithlord | January 5, 2008 8:27 PM

haha. McCain is really picking on Romney: "I agree, you [Romney] are the candidate of change."

This debate format is great.

Posted by mitch | January 5, 2008 8:32 PM

Wow, Fred really is awful...to be rude for a moment, do you think he is just a Hollywood drunk...and I use that word carefully. Or maybe he smokes pot AND drinks scotch.

Posted by Andruw | January 5, 2008 8:40 PM

Pithlord, I'm pretty sure anyone here is using Straight Talk with capital letters only ironically.

Posted by Consumatopia | January 5, 2008 8:40 PM

Get real, Matt. The Bush/McCain bill wasn't amnesty. If anything, it was on the punitive side, compared to what a really progressive immigration bill would likely look like. Calling it an amnesty bill is exactly the sort of outright false framing that Repugs specialize in and you're too smart to fall for.

Posted by Alex | January 5, 2008 8:48 PM

"That, I think, was the old John McCain who people liked."

That was McCain being a dishonest panderer, and Romney was smart to call him on it. Importing drugs from Canada is the same thing as importing Canada's price controls on drugs. Canada is free-riding off of the pharmaceutical research financed by American drug prices; if we import their price controls, there's no other market for us to free-ride off of. Pithlord is right.

Canada really gets off too easy on this -- it isn't some desperate third world country that can't afford to pay its fair share of the R&D costs. Its per-capita GDP is almost as high as ours and it is one of the world's largest oil producers. We buy Canada's oil at the market price -- a price that compensates and provides incentives for its oil companies' expensive investments in exploration and extraction. Canada should pay a fair price for the pharmaceutical R&D it benefits from.

McCain's slur of drug companies was also gratuitous and politically stupid. Bush largely neutralized this issue with his expansion of Medicare into Part D. Why encourage more anti-business rhetoric from Dems?

Posted by Fred | January 5, 2008 9:20 PM

Alex is right. MattY is usually too "smart" to fall for things like that. Either that or he reads his email and does what it tells him to do.

Meanwhile, it's obvious that any of the various schemes - no matter the details - are amnesty because that's how they would be perceived by potential illegal aliens in other countries. And, many of those would respond by trying to come here illegally. Some would make it in to that current scheme (through fraud), others would just have to wait a few years. And, that current scheme would trigger future schemes by giving even more power to those who currently oppose our laws.

And, another issue is that the MSM continues to allow McCain and others to mislead about their terminology. Given that most MSM sources support illegal activity in one way or another and for one reason or another, I have no doubt that that's intentional.

Posted by TLB | January 5, 2008 9:33 PM

Canada is free-riding off of the pharmaceutical research financed by American drug prices;

Oh, diddums. Poow wittle Fweddie, blaming the Canadians for their refusal to be given the Abner Louima treatment by Big Pharma.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | January 5, 2008 9:38 PM

Either that or he reads his email and does what it tells him to do.

Or perhaps the black helicopters sent from TJ shine out messages, Kelly? Just stay under the bed, frightened child: we'll tell you when the insurgency's started.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | January 5, 2008 9:41 PM

Canada is free-riding off of the pharmaceutical research financed by American drug prices; if we import their price controls, there's no other market for us to free-ride off of.

Actually, herein lies the right-wing case for importing Canadian drugs--Big Pharma knows exactly what you just said, and they would refuse to sell drugs to Canada unless they relaxed price controls. Essentially, allowing importation of Canadian drugs would force the drug companies to play hardball with Canada. The end result of importation could be an end to Canada's free riding.

Posted by Consumatopia | January 5, 2008 10:04 PM

Mitt Romney asks John McCain "don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys." McCain deadpans back: "they are."

This just shows McCain is a better politician than the Mittster. When you're the GOP, you pander to the *voters* during the election, you pander to the big corporations *after* you've safely been elected...

Posted by McKingford | January 5, 2008 10:07 PM

Most drugs are developed by small companies anyway, not by Big Pharma. Anyway we should work towards a culture in which people are less greedy and are less motivated by pure profit. The pharmaceutical companies get no sympathy from me. And by the way, Canadians do live longer than us.

I have no particular love for McCain, or other Republican politicians, but he's right on this one.

Posted by Hector | January 5, 2008 10:18 PM

Fact is you have to pay for research and development and regulatory compliance somehow. And you have to compensate for risk.

Yes, but our current system of encouraging R&D through patent monopolies is extraordinarily inefficient: it encourages excessive marketing expenses, as firms seek to pursue the monopoly profits associated with patent protection; wasted research spending into duplicative drugs; the neglect of research that is not likely to lead to patentable drugs; corruption of the research process. I'm not saying re-importing drugs from Canada is the answer, but we should look at alternative mechanisms to patent monopolies to financing drug research.

Posted by Peter H | January 5, 2008 10:39 PM

As someone totally in favor of Amnesty, I can say that McCain's bill wasn't it...

Posted by Spike | January 6, 2008 12:06 AM

I think we should deport Sullivan and Ponnuru.

Posted by Straight Talk Express | January 6, 2008 7:53 AM

NIH grants and university funding pay for the bulk of pharmaceutical research in the US. The three biggest PHARMA members have zero radical new drugs in the release pipeline; they purchase or license breakthroughs made by smaller firms. But mostly, they lobby FDA to greenlight new indications and formulations of existing drugs (e.g., approving a time-release formulation of Paxil for Social Anxiety Disorder. Like, what the fuck is Social Anxiety Disorder?)

Glaxo and their ilk comprise the SINGLE MOST PROFITABLE arena in the US economy. That lucre is coming directly from our pockets AND indirectly, via our taxes. Surely there has to be a way to address this imbalance. I'm not demonizing the drug manufacturers, nor am I absolving them from their role in the public interest. But the argument that new drugs would dry up if the drug companies had to trim profits is like saying that gamblers would stop playing if the minimum parlay at the black jack tables went up from $1 to $2.

Not gonna happen. Research and development is part of what pharma do. That's their business.

Posted by Jamey | January 6, 2008 8:21 AM

"Glaxo and their ilk comprise the SINGLE MOST PROFITABLE arena in the US economy."

Jamey- The software industry's average gross and net profit margins are 76% and 24% respectively, compared to 72% and 17% for pharma, so you are simply wrong.

All the small biotechs that are developing new drugs are in business for the same reason as big pharma, telecoms, software, and any other company that you can think of -- to make a profit.

The so-called "me too" drugs that so many rail against are valuable to all of us. Why is it that in every area except pharmaceuticals we expect more than one choice for a product purchase? Follow-on drugs address issues like side effects, adverse events and dosing convenience that pioneer drugs often do not. Take a look at the history of HIV drug development over the past 20 years. Pharmaceutical innovation has turned that disease from a certain death sentence to a chronic illness.

Peter H.- I took a look at the paper that you cited and can assert with confidence that none of the authors referenced in the paper have the foggiest notion about how drugs are developed or what incentivizes entrepreneurs. Simply put, if you eliminate patents, you lose new medicines.

Posted by Schecky | January 7, 2008 3:30 PM