This shouldn't even be a matter of debate, but now we're asked to believe that a more active federal government can deliver high-quality medical care. Gore asks us to believe that government management of prescription drugs for the elderly and price controls will not harm the quality of medical therapies. To his credit, Bush offers some reforms to inject competition into the Medicare system, but he too is expanding the federal role in the prescription drug market, making price controls more likely. As long as patients still wait for cures, we have to give people an incentive to create them. No drug company will spend a decade of research and a few hundred million bucks developing a new medicine if the company doesn't see a big return once the drug hits the market.
High profits are what investors demand to compensate for risky bets on medical research.
Seniors complain about drug prices because this is often the one item on a medical bill that requires cash out of their pockets. The bigger charges are already covered by your taxes. Let's figure out how to reduce these charges with some healthy competition before we pull drugs into the swamp of government entitlement. Maybe we give seniors a fixed amount and let them decide how to spend it. Maybe we stop giving insurance companies a laundry list of things they have to cover and allow consumers to decide what should be covered.