Left Center Left

Readers of this blog may notice that while my positions are pretty reliably (predictably?) liberal or even left-leaning, certain issues put me more in the company of conservatives or at least centrists than with fellow liberals. Trade policy, standardized school testing, and health care populism (i.e. blaming Big Pharma) all strike me as areas in which most liberals substitute well-meaning instinct for hard logic or attention to empirical support.

In fact, it’s these very areas that make me keep my distance from progressives. But how to convince the unconvinced? Via Marginal Revolution, I came across In the Pipeline, an erstwhile pharmaceutical researcher’s blog, which today fisks a piece of high-populist health care reporting from Robert Bazell in Slate. The whole post is worth a read, but I particularly like author Derek Lowe’s rebuttal of Bazell’s notion that market forces don’t apply to the predatory pricing of cancer drugs:

Now we’re down to that nondiscretionary spending issue. It’s a real one, and it applies not just to pharmaceuticals, but to every sort of health care. People value their health very highly, as they should. And it’s not that market forces don’t apply to drugs, it’s that no one seems to want them to. If they did so more directly, insurance companies would indeed start to balk, and drug companies would have to decide if they could lower the prices of their new therapies coming through the research pipeline. And if they couldn’t, they would have to decide not to take them through clinical trials at all. We would end up with fewer therapeutic options than we have now.

Well put. Now, I’m a proponent of some form of socialized health care, but I still think it should be the press’s role to explain and explore the trade-offs involved in any health care system, rather than obfuscate them with facile blame of corporations. The same goes for health care activists. It’s almost as if scared or unwilling to be Marx, the American left has settled for being D.W. Griffith.