America’s values and culture of innovation have made us – and keep us – the preeminent visionaries, creators, and inventors of the free world. For decades, the world’s best scientists and engineers, the world’s most pioneering companies, and the world’s greatest defenders of freedom and free markets have come from America. And in turn, we have produced an outsized share of the technological breakthroughs and advances that have revolutionized the world, making it healthier, freer, and more prosperous.
But around the globe, American hegemony is being challenged. Our adversaries and their allies – China, Russia, Iran – are looking for any opportunity to usurp America’s global economic, military, and industrial leadership.
Closer to home, our culture of innovation is also being threatened by an anti-competitive domestic agenda that could not only undermine American enterprise but also pose a threat to our national security. We must be cautious not to play into the hands of our enemies.
Unfortunately, some lawmakers have spent decades trying to push America towards importing overseas socialist price controls in the healthcare space -- which have proven detrimental to innovation. This has never been a good idea, and it is even more dangerous today as the United States sees foreign competitors erode our advantage in medical innovation.
Known as “most favored nation” price controls, this scheme involves importing drug prices from countries with government-run healthcare, forcing manufacturers into negative pricing scenarios and risking patient access to affordable and accessible medicine in America.
The Trump Administration must reject this centralized planning to protect our competitive edge.
Longer wait times for treatment would not be the only problem imported alongside European price controls. The suppression of lifesaving biomedical research, in which Europe lags substantially behind America, is certain to follow. Americans – and the world – benefit significantly from the research and development undertaken by America’s biotech firms. This will diminish their capacity for such innovation.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that in the long term, drug price controls would lead to “lower spending on research and development and thus reduce the introduction of new drugs.” A University of Chicago study also found that drug price controls in America could lead to a 60 percent reduction in R&D investment through 2039, possibly leading to some 340 new drugs that would never be developed or go to market. And like the “Space Race” during the Cold War, when America falls behind in science and technology, our competitors step in to fill the vacuum.
Today, China is making it clear that it intends to surpass us in medicine. This communist country already leads the world in generating the most-cited synthetic biology research papers and has begun outpacing the U.S. in STEM field graduates. They also have overtaken the U.S. in listed clinical trials last year. Meanwhile, China’s pharmaceutical and medical technology patents have grown by well over 300 percent in the last decade. Further, from 2016 to 2021, the market capitalization of Chinese biotechnology firms was up nearly 100-fold.
Discouraging domestic innovation at home while China is rapidly expanding its own capabilities will jeopardize our ability to remain the world leader in life-saving medical advances. In this scenario, we risk a catastrophic brain drain of our sharpest minds, economic stagnation as R&D investment leaves our shores, and the worsening of health outcomes for America’s patients.
The answer to rising U.S. health costs is not to import failed price controls from countries like the UK, where patients routinely experience delays for critical treatments -- and while billions of dollars in research investments are being paused or abandoned. Increasing our domestic investments in R&D while holding foreign nations accountable for unfair practices and Intellectual Property abuse is a positive solution. Reforms that streamline drug trials and fix market inefficiencies are also a fruitful path forward.
Only by taking such steps will we enhance patient access, bolster America’s leadership, protect our national security, and stay ahead of China.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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