Health care and the Government

Description: What does the government owe to the health of its citizens?

Question: What role should the government play?

Transcript: You know we have a hybrid system in America. We have government health care under Medicare and Medicaid. And we have SCHIP for children, which we in the industry support. We believe government does play a role in helping to subsidize the provision of health care to folks who can’t otherwise afford it. We believe that’s part of our responsibility as well so we try to carry it out. And we do believe that there’s a role for the public sector here. We certainly supported the doubling of the research budget to NIH which does so much basic research about human biology and disease. And we . . . we believe there’s a public role there. We recognize, first of all, that, you know, that hospitals in America and doctors in America provide free care today to patients who can’t afford it. And all of us subsidize that free care through higher insurance premiums. In effect we’re subsidizing the uninsured in America through the provision of free service, and hospitals, and clinics, and doctor offices, and through our free medicines that we give out. So having government subsidize insurance for low income people in America makes sense to us. And having programs designed specifically for categories of Americans who can’t afford to buy their own insurance – for people who work in plants where insurance is not provided, for example – makes sense to us. We believe in universal insurance coverage for our country. In the meantime we’re gonna do our part to make sure medicines reach people who can’t afford it. So do we support government programs? Yes. Do we support government regulating the private sector? No. The private sector has a huge value to this country. It’s where the research is occurring. It’s where the . . . literally all these new discoveries are happening. People around the world envy what we have in America in terms of our basic research facilities at NIH; and then our applied research base here in America where the companies actually test out these principles with molecules and biologic products that end up saving human lives like my own. So we see and understand that relationship, and we believe it should . . . it should continue. What we don’t believe is that we have to yield to total government regulation and control of a marketplace that depends so much upon private investors and private dollars to fund research.

Question: What is your take on government regulation?

Transcript: Yeah well first of all safety is the most important area of regulation. FDA has a huge role to play there. I remember back in 1987 when I was in the Congress serving under Chairman John Dingell from Michigan as a Democrat, that this country was infested with an importation of fake birth control pills. And women all over America were taking birth control and getting pregnant and didn’t know why. And fake medicine was coming into this country. And so we passed something called the PDMA, which is Pharmaceutical Drug Marketing Act, which said in effect you could bring all the medicines you wanted in from foreign manufacturers into this country; but the manufacturers have to be FDA approved. Otherwise we have to make sure the manufacturing facility is a safe one that manufactures a safe product. And two, that drugs have to stay in the custody of the manufacturer until they reach America. It’s a good example of a regulatory regime that protects us from counterfeit drugs that come from places like China, or Indonesia or what have you. And for the most part we’re still protected by that law. That’s a good law. The law we passed, it gives . . . it gives the FDA the obligation of testing drugs and certifying the clinical trial results to make sure that we know as much as we can about the efficacy of the drug, how well it’s going to perform, and what are the likely side effects; recognizing that you may . . . you can’t know it all, but we gotta know as much as we can. And then a good information system that reports on . . . on . . . on perhaps adverse effects so we can continually . . . to monitor drugs in the marketplace. Those make sense. And they make sense because we’re dealing with products that people are going to ingest that are either going to help them or hurt them. And every drug has side effects. So these are areas where we believe regulation is very critical. And we support the FDA. We provide today 60, 70 percent of its funding. So make sure that we’ve got a good, sound, safe system that . . . where the FDA is properly resourced to test these products. We accept . . . not only accept that; we support that.

Recorded on: 9/11/07