Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a plan she says will reduce the price of prescription drugs: More regulation.
"Mrs. Clinton begins her treatment plan by focusing on 'price gouging' by pharmaceutical companies and the need for price regulation," writes Scott Gottlieb in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal commentary.
"What she fails to comprehend is that the high drug prices she decries aren't the result of market forces gone wild," Gottlieb writes. "Rather, they are the result of bad regulation that has created market failures and shortages."
On the surface, last week's news that investor Martin Shkreli purchased a pharmaceutical company and raised the price of the little-used drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent bolstered Clinton's price gouging claim.
Yet Gottlieb points out how that completely legal action could have easily been averted simply by a smarter federal regulatory policy that allows for more competition in the drug marketplace.
"But if another company wanted to compete to sell the same medicine, it would need to apply for a new generic drug approval, by submitting an 'Abbreviated New Drug Application' to the FDA," Gottlieb writes.
"Filing one of these applications with the FDA used to take as little as $1 million; today it can run as high as $20 million, sometimes more. This means that old but 'niche' drugs may not have competition from other generic entrants, creating an opening for companies to extract windfall profits by driving up the prices of drugs like Daraprim."
The FDA has a backlog of thousands of generic drug applications, Gottlieb said. On average, it takes about 50 months - that's more than four years - for the FDA to approve a single generic application.
"If Mrs. Clinton is serious about helping patients, she should focus on lowering the cost and time necessary for generic-drug entry, thus reducing the chance of perpetual monopolies for old, off-patent drugs like Daraprim."
The Left likes to blame problems on big corporations led by greedy 1 percenters who control Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Energy, Big This and Big That.
But the more people become informed on how government agencies erect barriers and clog markets and the free flow of innovation and enterprise, it increasingly becomes evident that Big Government is the cause of most of the Big Problems.