Drug Markets and Regulation

With this attitude, we’re not going to have much of a drug development or production industry—to the detriment of our drug market.

“A big part of our concern is not just Sovaldi [a new, and so still very expensive, drug with a near-perfect cure rate for Hepatitis C], but all the other specialty drugs,” said Mario Molina, the CEO of Molina Healthcare that runs Medicaid and ObamaCare plans in nine states, on a July earnings call. He added: “I think that the government needs to step in here and make sure that the market is rational. If we as a health plan want a rate increase, we have to go to our regulators and get it approved. There’s no such thing going on in the pharmaceutical market.

Molina’s last is a valid beef. Health plan providers shouldn’t have to go to government regulators to get permission to set a price, either. Government simply should not have that regulatory power. But a man used to government regulation, indeed who’s dependent on his company’s status as a protected oligopolist, no longer even can conceive of having to compete on price and service.

He concluded his plaint:

Right now, pharmaceutical companies can charge whatever they want, and I think there needs to be a rational basis for all of this.

Of course, there is exactly that rational basis: it’s the supply and demand price setting of a free market.  Again, though, a concept lost on a man of a protected oligopoly.

And So It Begins

The crumbling of the Afghan polity is under way.

A reporter wrote a news reporting/opinion piece about the Afghan government that didn’t comport with that government’s approved view of itself. As a result,

Afghanistan’s attorney general has banned a New York Times reporter from leaving the country after he wrote a story about unnamed officials seeking to take power if the country’s presidential election deadlock persists.

The reporter’s…error?

Attorney General Basir Azizi said the story…could “create fear and confusion among the people” and that [reporter Matthew] Rosenberg will not be allowed to leave the country until it has been investigated by officials.

Of course.

A Child King

Kim Jong Un, the child, and the king, in question, is describing Secretary of State John Kerry as a wolf with a “hideous lantern jaw.”

He’s also termed President Barack Obama a monkey and Republic of Korea President Park Geun-hye a prostitute.

The AP thinks these are “crude insults,” and so they are, but it’s also important to keep in mind that these are, at bottom, the childish name-callings of a poorly raised adolescent. In the end, while any proper raising requires discipline, and Kim should be held to account for his misbehavior, the boy is more to be pitied for his condition than condemned for his behavior.

That he has an unstable finger on crude nuclear weapons also is a concern, the way any child playing with a gun is, but that’s a separate question.

“Climate” Again

Texas and California are in the middle of droughts. This is, of course, due to man-caused climate change. Or is it? Watts Up With That has a couple of graphs that bear on the matter.

This one gives one idea of the history of droughts and wet periods over the last, oh, say, 1,200 years:NorthAmericaDroughtGrid

The dots in the upper part of the figure give the locations at which measurements were taken. The lower part gives the time history of wet vs dry for the time frame indicated; the dotted lines flanking the solid black line give the error range for the measurements. The shaded yellow area to the right indicates the (limited) time frame of interest to our climate panic mongers. The average dryness for an earlier period (notice that it’s outside the time of interest to our mongers) is shown by the solid red line, and the average wetness is shown by the blue line that’s partially obscured by the yellow shading.

This graph gives a clearer indication of wet and dry periods, including that long time frame so studiously ignored by our mongers. The graph points up California’s strait because Watt’s article was centered on all the nonsense California’s Democrats are spouting about their drought. It pretty much speaks for itself.200YrCaliforniaDrought

The graph’s small text may be hard to read; it says

Evidence from tree rings shows that drought was historically much more widespread in the American West than now, while the 20th century was wetter than normal. Percentage of the West affected by drought from 800 AD to 2000.

Hmm….

Was the Palestinian Authority Ever Serious

…during the latest cease fire in its terror war against Israel [emphasis added]?

Israel has suspended talks with Palestinian factions in Cairo after three rockets from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel, breaking a cease-fire aimed at allowing negotiators to broker a long-term truce for the conflict-ridden territory.

The rocket fire came hours after Israel and Palestinian factions resumed negotiations toward a cease-fire deal. On Monday night, both sides accepted a proposal by Egyptian mediators to prolong their cease-fire from Monday to Tuesday midnight local time to give extra time to reach an agreement.

…Izzat Al Risheq, a senior Hamas official and delegate to the talks, expressed pessimism on Monday that more talk would produce a durable accord.

No, they never were. They just wanted the days in which to rest, recuperate, and reform so they could resume.

Neither, evidently, is the UN serious.

…Robert Serry, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, urged negotiators to agree on a durable cease-fire so reconstruction could start.

“Gaza urgently needs houses, hospitals and schools—not rockets, tunnels and conflict,” Mr. Serry told the council.

Sure. If he actually believed that, he’d be moving to stop UNRWA from warehousing the terrorists’ rockets for them, allowing the terrorists to dig their tunnels under UNRWA facilities, or participating in the terrorists’ staged propaganda.

No, this was all about buying time for the PA to get their rest, recuperation, and refitting.