Ready for even more medical shortages?

Big Pharma giant Merck has emerged as an unlikely voice for freedom, which is what comes when one’s ox is gored.

They’ve got a lawsuit out to overturn at least part of Joe Biden’s odious “Inflation Reduction Act,” which has an Orwellian clause about forcing pharmaceutical companies to allow the feds to dictate their prices, which amounts to constitutionally prohibited confiscation without compensation and, sure as the sun comes up, will lead to even more medical shortages.

That’s on top of the medical shortages we are already seeing, thanks to Pete Buttigieg’s latest supply chain failure.

According to Betsy McCaughey, in an op-ed for the Daily Caller,

last year, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, they rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act, boasting that it would enable Medicare to “negotiate” lower prices for medications for seniors.

“Negotiate” is a lie. Under the new law, the government can strong-arm companies to sell their most popular medications at a price Uncle Sam dictates, or be taxed out of existence in a matter of weeks. On June 6, the pharmaceutical giant Merck sued, claiming the law violates its constitutional rights.

Amen. This lawsuit is a red flag for everyone in America who owns anything or hopes to.

The actual language of the law is breathtakingly coercive, but let’s face it, most members of Congress don’t bother to read bills before voting on them.

The law says that any company that refuses to sell at the government’s price will be hit with a tax that starts at 186% of the drug’s revenues on Day 1 and is hiked daily until it reaches a ruinous 1,900% of revenues — not just from government sales but all sales. That would mean hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes per day.

Basically, the government dictates what prices it will pay to drug companies for seniors on Medicaid, and the company must take it, or else.

That will lead to price hikes for everyone else, given that companies will be forced to make up whatever losses the government price diktat brings to its purchases, which will hit the company’s bottom line unless it can make up the losses someplace else.  That’s a pretty sleazy, sneaky way of forcing Big Pharma to raise its prices on other customers and then have the public blame it instead of the government, which got its primo carve-out at its own price first, triggering the desperate effort to make the losses up.

That’s what happens first.  After that, the shortages come, which is what price controls always do.  Then producers will Go Galt and just quit making the stuff, so no medicine for you, which is often the case in Europe, Canada, and other socialized medicine localities.  Good luck if you’re a cancer patient and need a cocktail of custom-created medications on a precise schedule, which isn’t what you get in Europe.  Those patients are already seeing shortages on that front due to Pete Buttigieg’s supply chain crisis.  Now they get this new hurdle to treatment.

McCaughey notes that even European companies in euro-socialist states have the right to turn the government down if they don’t want to take the government’s offering price for meds.  In Biden’s bill, they don’t have that right — they will be taxed to death if they dare say “no.”  Even creepier, she notes that they are required to call that government-dictated price “fair” no matter how unfair it is, in a naked violation of their First Amendment protections. 

According to McCaughey:

The law also gags the company from disclosing what Medicare officials say about price “negotiations” behind closed doors. Worse, the law requires the company to publicly call the price rammed down its throat “fair.” 

Is this even America? Congress limits free speech and requires companies to state things they don’t believe. 

Merck’s lawsuit objects, “Our Constitution does not countenance compelled speech in service of state propaganda.”

Well, yeah.

Why did they put that sleazy little rider in compelling Orwellian Newspeak after the takings?  They weren’t happy about having all the power on pricing, so they also wanted an “I love you, my master” affirmation, too?  Like what a wife-beater wants of his victim?  It’s downright abusive.

They aren’t even allowed to complain about it, let alone talk about how gross the government coercers may act behind closed doors.

Was it to ensure that Merck understood that it, too, was not special in this grand scheme of things, so it too would own nothing and be happy?

That sounds like a lawsuit that will be an easy win for them in court, assuming that the corruption of the courts isn’t total.

What McCaughey emphasizes in her piece that this isn’t just about Merck.  It’s about everyone, with the bill threatening our right to private property in the extreme.

On the logic of this vile bill:

Auto makers could be forced to sell cars for the federal fleet for $10,000 a piece instead of a fair price. What about bed sheets for the Army, airplane parts for the Air Force or restaurant meals for government employees?

In conditions like that, it will be “poof,” “poof,” “poof” for private companies, which still enable the U.S. to hold the title of most innovative in the world.

That lawsuit had better come out in Merck’s favor, or we are all going to lose from this — our rights, our life-saving meds, and our democracy.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.