CHICAGO – JULY 23: Lipitor tablets sit in a tray at a Pharmacy July 23, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker and manufacturer of the cholesterol drug Lipitor, said today its second quarter profit rose to $2.78 billion. Lipitor is the world’s top-selling drug. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Ludwig von Mises long ago observed that the notion of luxury is entirely historical. The previous truth is important to remember as Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) take aim at generic drugs. For the senators to question the safety and quality of generics whether produced stateside or overseas is for them to question the brilliant evolution of all market advances that ultimately expand access to goods formerly inaccessible to all but the richest of the rich, if at all.
Cars once driven by the very rich were rendered plentiful by Henry Ford given his desire to manufacture them for “the great multitude.” The first IBM mainframe computer in the 1960s fetched over $1 million dollars, only for visionaries like Michael Dell to become billionaires by virtue of mass-producing computers similarly available to “the great multitude.” In 1983, Motorola launched the first mobile phone for $3,995, while today we have supercomputers in our pockets that transmit calls for us, in addition to thousands of other features.
Which is why pharmaceutical advance is so important. No doubt politicians can and do blanch at the dollars expended on innovations meant to mitigate the horrors of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and countless other maladies, but the people invariably benefit. And this is true even if it’s similarly true that initial pharmaceutical leaps gift the very few very well to do with drugs not available to the broader population. We should cheer such an outcome, and for obvious reasons.
As the formerly inaccessible car, computer, and mobile phone make blindingly plain, the luxuries of the very rich foretell what we’ll all enjoy if markets are free. It’s that simple.
Which is the point of generic drugs. They’re brilliant pharmaceutical representations of what’s true in all walks of profit-motivated life. What’s expensive in the near-term, and as pharmaceutical companies recoup the enormous costs associated with funding their intrepid leaps, eventually is not.
All of which helps explain why 90 percent of pharmaceutical prescriptions filled are generic. It’s an essential progression.
Which is why pushback against Sens. Scott and Gillibrand is so necessary. For them to attack generic drugs, and in particular foreign-produced generics is for the senators to attack a progression that has long democratized access to life-enhancing and life-saving drugs. Worse, it’s an attack on the evolution of all market advances that are invariably an effect of globalized production.
At which point it’s quite simply odd that Scott would call into question the validity of the FDA’s inspections of foreign generics. The questioning implies an easy FDA that is belied by history, and that Republicans have long criticized as too stringent.
For now, healthcare and the drugs associated with it are frequently expensive. Which is the point. What’s great has to be initially expensive, but much more importantly, what’s inexpensive and accessible to all must initially be quite costly.
Thank goodness for the globalized production that eventually turns costly scarcity into abundance. Scott and Gillibrand should be thankful too, and retrieve legislation meant to suffocate the democratization of what improves life, and often saves it too.