Hospital Drug Shortages: First Blame Republicans. Then, Democrats.

In 2003, George W. Bush signed into law, the Republican lead initiative called the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act".  Under the law, seniors enrolled in the new Medicare, Part D, could obtain their prescription drugs at substantially lower prices.  At least if they didn't reach the now-infamous "Doughnut Hole".   But, also, as part of that law, drugs sold directly to health care providers were restricted from price hikes.  And, that fact, today, has caused a major drug shortage problem in the United States.

Right now, many seriously ill patients are being told that they cannot start or continue life-saving drug therapies because the medication they need is either in short supply or completely unavailable.  Many of those drugs are actually cheap generics that have been around for many years.  The problem generally starts with a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspection and the eventual shut down of a drug manufacturing facility because of some violation.  This, in turn, forces a drug to become in short supply.  Normally, this shortage  would cause the price to rise significantly.   As a result, the higher price would typically motivate the original manufacturer to get on the stick and meet FDA compliance and restart manufacturing and distribution at that new higher price.  At the same time, other competing companies would want to take advantage of the higher prices by upping their production.  But, when the prices are "fixed" by federal law, there is no incentive for a manufacturer to spend millions to bring their plant into compliance with the FDA or for any other manufacturer to spend money to up their rate of production.

This is a perfect example of why price fixing doesn't work.  Shame on the Republicans and George Bush for causing this problem.  Some people may actually die because of it.  And, shame on the Democrats who had complete control of Congress and the Presidency for ignoring the problem and not correcting it.  Instead, all those Democrats were too focused on taking over health care in America.  Even today, it is well known why there are drug shortages and, yet, Congress still refuses to fix the law that's caused the problem.  It's things like this that give Congress its well-deserved 10% approval rating.