Tuesday, January 2, 2018

A positive story about Trumpery

From Bloomberg's Max Nisen, an apparently deeply-informed story about drug policy and a bureaucrat who is able to make decisive -- and perhaps mostly positive-- changes, from the point of view of consumers.

This is not an area I know anything about, so I am not firm in my evaluation of the reporting, but it sounds good and Bloomberg is more reliable on subjects like this than, say, The Wall Street Journal.

Interesting claim:

 Gottlieb seems to believe in the price-lowering power of competition. It sounds like a talking point. But it's already working in the generic-drug market. And a series of rapid hepatitis C drug approvals have lowered prices so significantly that it slowed the entire country's drug-spending growth.
This reinforces a point RtO has made several times: The United States spends so much on health -- and is so wasteful and stupid about it -- that wringing out useless spending would cost several hundred thousand jobs and put the economy into formal recession. In other words, the US has not shown any genuine economic expansion in about 40 years. It has grown simply by digging holes and refilling them.

Health and military spending have created a growth illusion.

I do not understand enough about how economies evolve to know how long fake growth is sustainable.




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