The Post gets it right on drug research!

Responding to a story that appeared two weeks ago in the New York Times, the Washington Post on Sunday editorialized that paying for a quadrupling of prices on cancer therapies that may extend life by a few months may not be a wise expenditure of public funds. There has to be major debate about this issue before the Medicare drug benefits goes into effect next year. Here's the upshot of the editorial:

"So, the appealing assumption about medical research -- that more is always better -- turns out to be wrong. Huge research budgets, financed by sky-high drug prices that reflect an absence of market discipline, come at the expense of diminished corporate competitiveness, stagnant wages, growing numbers of Americans who can't afford insurance, and higher taxes. The way to fix this problem is to create a health care market that pays for only cost-effective treatment; price signals would then refocus the research establishment on producing useful therapies."

-- Washington Post editorial, July 17, 2005