Joe Biden: Bush 'brain dead'

This is why I never opt to be an organ donor. For a conservative there's always a good chance that some liberal wing-nut is going to come along and declare you eligible for harvest.

Senator Joe Biden proved today (again) that he deserve his Demo Party membership when he declared before a friendly gathering of union workers in Delaware that Bush 'is brain dead' , referring to the president's position on prescription drug policies. Union leaders at the event were inclined to give Biden a pass, naturally. Or as one woman said of Biden, "his heart's in the right place." The story does not say whether she actually used a stethescope or X-ray to verify her remarks.

Biden is of the opinion that the only reasons pharmaceutical companies are no longer making many medicines in the U.S. is tax policy encouraging "outsourcing" and the failure to give the government leverage to hammer down prices.

The outsourcing argument has been debunked by various economists, and as to the government's inability to negotiate for lowered prices, listen up:

The number one reason pharmaceutical companies have gone elsewhere is liability. They cannot afford to spend billions to develop new drugs and then lose their profits to opportunistic tort lawyers, who stand by anxiously looking for anecdotal and morbidity data that might show that a statistical trend of patient reactions. No drug, not even one of our oldest, penicillan, is 100% safe for everybody. But drug companies have found they cannot afford even a handful of adverse reactions, even with FDA approval. This is why there is no American manufacturer of flu vaccines. Even more so than our petroleum industry relies on foreign oil, we have come to rely on foreign sources of medicines.

There is another reason flu vaccines are made in the US of A. When the government's flu vaccine program was overhauled during the Clinton Administration, the Clintons insisted on giving government officials the power to negotiate down prices. In other words, they put an artificial ceiling on the price, but provided drug manufacturers no protection against litigation and settlement expense.

The market is an unforgiving mistress. Mistreat her at your peril. Keeping down the price of flu vaccines so that millions could benefit sounded really good at the time. In retrospect it merely set in motion a chain of decisions and inevitabilities. The chickens have now come home to roost, as we say at sundown here in the Oklahoma hills.

Biden (and Kerry, Edwards, et al) can accuse Dubya all he wants, but he's the only one talking about a market-based solution to the drug problem, and the only one talking about tort reform. We won't say that the liberal Democrats are brain dead on this one, but we'd better get a monitor on them just in case.