Patients are suffering from a nationwide shortage of more than 260 different prescription drugs, many of them for different types of cancer. Senior Fellow Greg Conko explains why the biggest culprit for the drug shortage is Washington. DEA and FDA regulations make it difficult to ramp up supply, or to change prices to more accurately reflect demand.
Yesterday, the next step toward Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy completing his scheme to force unionize personal care attendants took place. CTNewsJunkie.com reported:
The four-member Personal Care Attendant Working Group adopted a series of “options” Wednesday that will allow the state to move forward with plans to allow personal care attendants to collectively bargain for their salary and benefits. Personal Care Attendants take care of low-income disabled individuals through a Medicaid waiver system operated by the state.
The final report does not recommend a specific union or specific process for unionization. The daycare providers covered by Malloy’s executive order No. 9 have already voted to form a union. The personal care attendants have not.
That’s right, the government created another level of bureaucracy, the Personal Care Attendant Working Group, to issue “options” for collective bargaining to workers who are not unionized.
The Working Group’s report recommends:
The final report does not recommend a specific union or specific process for unionization. The daycare providers covered by Malloy’s executive order No. 9 have already voted to form a union. The personal care attendants have not.
The report, which no one had a copy of at the meeting, recommended that personal care attendants be covered by the State Employee Relations Act for the purposes of legislation. However, it said they would not considered state employees and would not have access to the state employee pension plan. Instead, a group would be formed to represent them in negotiations with the state.
One of the left’s favorite mantras is that government regulations and special interest groups provide the only ways that workers can get ahead. This notion was on display at a congressional briefing held on February 13 by the labor advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC).
At ROC’s briefing, “Gender Equality in the Restaurant Industry,” speakers equated the tipped minimum wage — the base a restaurant must pay its workers before the employee receives cash tips — with gender discrimination, as 66 percent of tipped workers are women.
What is ROC’s angle? First, to further its political agenda by helping Rep. Donna Edwards, the keynote speaker at the briefing, push her bill. The tortuously named Working for Adequate Gains for Employment in Services (WAGES) Act (H.R. 631) would raise the national minimum wage for tipped workers from $2.13 an hour to $5.50 an hour within two years. The second is to help ROC push discrimination claims against restaurants it is trying to target.
The law already stipulates that if tips do not equal the federal minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. Therefore, it is illegal for waitresses to earn less than $7.25 an hour, despite the grim picture Edwards and ROC attempt to portray.
This argument relies heavily on the myth that there is no upward mobility in the industry and tips never increase. The speakers continually attempted to drive home the point that “tipped workers [read women, who are more likely to work for tips] haven’t received a raise in 20 years.”
This “found” discrimination will no doubt be used by ROC against the restaurants it is trying to target. According to Crain’s New York a ROC attack “often includes noisy and prolonged protests outside the eatery. Settling is often the less expensive option for restaurateurs mindful of their brand’s image and the cost of a long court fight.”
The official unemployment rate is going down, but that’s partly because many long-term unemployed people went onto Social Security Disability, citing ailments such as depression. Now that they have a monthly government check, they are never, ever going back to work, and they are no longer treated by the government as unemployed, since they are not seeking work. The Washington Post’s Bob Samuelson explained recently how vast numbers of Americans are going onto Social Security Disability. Carter and Reagan tried without success to reform this program, and were blocked by Congress. The current administration has no interest in reforming it, since it helps mask persistently-high unemployment.
As Zero Hedge notes, exploding disability claims are credited “with distorting the unemployment rate and making it lower than most expect or believe.” It cites a study noting that “nearly 25% of those not actively seeking a job had applied for, and been accepted, by disability — mostly Social Security.” It cites a JP Morgan Chase report noting that “once someone starts receiving these benefits, it’s almost impossible to take them off the program. In 2011 only 1% of the recipients lost their benefits because they were no longer deemed disabled. . .The cost to the federal budget of these programs has escalated along with the number of claimants, and now runs around $200 billion per year — more than the budgets of the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, and State combined. Thus a quarter of people who drop out of the workforce and come off the unemployment benefits, simply move to receiving disability payments. And most stay there until they roll into the social security program when they retire — from their disability.”
OPINION
GLENN G. LAMMI: “Court Should Dismiss Privacy Group’s Suit vs. FTC Over Google Buzz Settlement”
“On Friday, a federal court in Washington, D.C. will hear what the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) thinks about a lawsuit the online privacy advocate EPIC has filed demanding that FTC charge Google with violations of a settlement agreement between FTC and Google involving Google Buzz. [...] The issue here is whether a non-party to the FTC-Google agreement can force FTC to fine Google.”
PHILLIP KLEIN: “Obama’s High Wire Act on Insurance Mandate Crashes”
“By 2009, Obama was publicly touting the mandate. And in a famous interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that September, he insisted that the mandate to purchase health insurance was not a tax. Yet by the following June, things had changed. The Obama administration’s legal team was scrambling to respond to lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the health care law. [...] Acknowledging the mandate is a tax would mean that it was a direct violation of his pledge not to raise taxes on those earning under $250,000. But publicly denying that it is a tax directly contradicts the administration’s legal argument.”
NEW YORK POST EDITORIAL: “The Bad-Teacher Test”
“Team Cuomo sounded upbeat yesterday about a deal for a new system for rating teachers — and, presumably, firing bad ones — as its self-imposed Thursday deadline nears. Indeed, odds are good that New York’s biggest teachers union will strike an ‘agreement’ with the State Education Department — or that Gov. Cuomo will keep his vow to impose teacher-evaluation guidelines as part of his budget. But the devil resides very much in the details. Once the smoke clears, will public schools finally be able to easily rid themselves of incompetent teachers? The depressing answer: Not likely.”
The California State Assembly is considering sweeping legislation aimed at protecting the “rights” of state employees.
According to its sponsor, Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento), the bill will “ensure that essential working conditions are met, enhance and clarify the expectations of employees and management alike, and improve the working relationship between rank and file workers and state managers. In turn, these changes will result in improved worker productivity and more harmonious personnel relations.”
Of course, the notion that a bill that would bar California from imposing work quotas on public employees, would keep supervisors from “unreasonably prevent[ing] the employee from using his or her daily rest and lunch periods,” and says “an employee shall not be compelled to perform extra work” will improve productivity is dubious at best.
What does the bill define as “extra work?” Anything that is not described in the “current, detailed, and accurate job description” that the state would be required to provide “at the onset of employment” and at “regular intervals” to employees. The content of that job description, and all performance reviews, would be required to take “significant input” from “peer review committees” that will be “authorized to have regular input regarding the operation of the workplace.”
In the “harmonious” workplace that Assemblyman Dickinson envisions, workers will be afforded every possible legal advantage over the state. If the state misses any deadline in responding to any complaint filed by any employee, the grievance “shall be considered to have been resolved in favor of the employee.”
Canada is cracking down on the latest terrorist threat to innocent people everywhere: transgendered people. A July 2011 provision added to the Canadian Aeronautics Act’s Identity Screening Regulations says, “An air carrier shall not transport a passenger… who does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”
Suppose someone was born female but lives life as a male. If his valid government-issued photo ID still identifies him as female, he may not board an airplane. It can take years of filling out forms and enduring hearings to convince courts to legally recognize that someone has crossed genders, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) movingly writes in her autobiography, Crossing. The result is a de facto ban on flying for most transgendered Canadians.
Dennis Lebel is Canada’s Transportation Minister. He supports the ban. He believes it increases passenger safety.
It doesn’t, actually. Here’s why. A passenger is a threat if he carries weapons or explosives on board. If he doesn’t, he’s not. This is true whether or not his appearance matches his ID, or whether it says “M” or “F.” This is true even if the passenger uses a fake ID, or none at all. Can this person bring down a plane? That is the question.
In other words, showing ID has precisely nothing to do with passenger safety. It’s all for show. The point is if you have weapons and explosives or not.
Lebel and the Canadian security screeners who work for him should keep this in mind. The nasty little provision may or may not be specifically targeted at gender crossers. But in practice it is discrimination, and it does not make air travelers any safer. If anything, by distracting screeners from searching for weapons and explosives, it makes passengers a little less safe. This is bad policy all around. It should be repealed immediately.
Now that the problem of prescription drug shortages has begun to affect children, members of Congress want to be seen as doing something – anything, really – to avert the crisis. A bi-partisan group of House members led by Rep. John Carney (D-Del.) introduced a bill two weeks ago. And yesterday, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Robert Casey (D-Penn.) moved to attach their drug shortage bill to a piece of transportation legislation moving through the Senate. Unfortunately, most of the proposed action will have little to no affect on the fundamental underlying problems associated with drug shortages. Worse still, by ignoring the real problems and trying to put a defective bandage on the symptoms, the bills very well may make the shortages worse.
First, some background. There are currently around 250 prescription medicines — most of them generic versions of cancer drugs and surgical anesthetics — that are considered to be in “short supply”, according to the American Society of Health System Pharmacists. That’s up sharply from well below 100 drug shortages in a typical year — rising from just 58 in 2004 to 149 in 2008 to 211 in 2010. And, though there are alternatives for many of these drugs, several have no good alternatives for certain conditions. As USA Today’s Liz Szabo discusses, a shortage in the cancer drug methotrexate is particularly troublesome for children with acute lymphocytic or lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). There are alternatives to methotrexate for other cancers, but not for ALL.
So, why the recent spate of shortages? In some cases, it’s due to a shortage in raw materials. And, for drugs like Ritalin and other ADHD treatments, heavy-handed DEA regulations have made it difficult to increase production of the raw materials. But only a relatively small portion of the shortages can be attributed to a shortage in raw materials. Still other regulations have significantly contributed to the shortages in many other products.
John Goodman summarized some of these other issues nicely in a post last summer. One contributing factor is the FDA’s increasingly strict regulation of drug manufacturing facilities, which Goodman calls a “zero tolerance regime” that is “forcing manufacturers to abide by rules that are rigid, inflexible and unforgiving.” FDA has been more aggressive in shutting down production facilities when even small quality control problems arise. A decade or two ago, a paperwork problem or some inappropriate handling procedure that didn’t directly affect drug safety or quality might have been addressed with a slap on the wrist. But over the last several years (and not just since the beginning of the Obama administration) FDA has, more and more, addressed these problems by temporarily shutting down plants until the problems could be resolved.
Here’s a letter I recently sent to Businessweek:
Editor, Businessweek:
Elizabeth Dwoskin and Mark Drajem’s February 9 article “Regulations Create Jobs, Too” points out that regulation doesn’t so much create jobs as redirect them somewhere else.
Lobbying, politicking, and special favors are part and parcel of the regulatory process. The result is that many regulation-created jobs are not created on the merits. If a job requires a regulation to be created, that usually means the job it replaced created more value for consumers. Regulations may not destroy jobs on net, but they do destroy wealth.
Markets respect no special interest; agencies like the EPA and SEC exist solely to cater to them. This is wonderful for politically connected companies like Breen Energy Solutions and Nol-Tec Systems, but the rest of us are poorer for it.
Ryan Young
Fellow in Regulatory Studies
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, D.C.
UPDATE AND RESPONSE BELOW
Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.), who will not be seeking reelection this November, decided that he would make one last-ditch attempt to get his awful piece of legislation from last year (the Railroad Antitrust Enforcement Act) passed by the Senate as an amendment to their highway bill. The primary purpose of the legislation is to remove the limited antitrust exemptions granted to America’s private railroads. Right now, the Surface Transportation Board, which is the watered-down successor organization to the tyrannical Interstate Commerce Commission, has sole authority in ruling over matters of competition policy within the railroad industry.
You might ask, “Why do the railroads get that special privilege? Is that fair?” Fairness is not the proper way to look at it; rather, common sense and economic sanity is. Given the type of industry the railroads are — vertically integrated (they own and manage both track and the trains) network industries that operate across many states — applying traditional antitrust scrutiny to railroads is wholly inappropriate if the goal is to maximize social welfare. The Surface Transportation Board, while certainly a regulator with serious problems, has a wealth of technical knowledge and experience in dealing with this very special industry. This is why most people who know anything about railroads, who are not in the pocket of major shipper lobbies, react with horror whenever knuckleheads in Congress introduce such dumb legislation.
Unfortunately, Sen. Kohl, an antitrust-maximalist romantic if there ever was one, wishes to open the door for potentially disastrous actions on the part of the U.S. government. I suspect Kohl, along with others who rely on outdated antitrust and industrial organization theory to formulate their opinions of railroads, has forgotten what happened when the railroads were heavily regulated by the ironfisted ICC. The entire industry almost collapsed and Northeast freight service was taken over by the federal government after the Penn Central went bankrupt. But since the Staggers Act that deregulated the railroad industry, shippers and consumers alike have enjoyed huge benefits, all while the industry consolidated and returned to profitability.
The ICC may have been terrible and the STB may be bad, but Kohl is proposing that we unleash the antitrust zealots at the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission. That’s not just terrible, that’s completely insane!
While Sen. Kohl’s legislation has essentially zero chance in becoming law, if you need another reason to oppose the Senate’s surface transportation bill, it is terrible enough to justify voting no on the entire Senate package if it is accepted as an amendment.
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