J.D. Tuccille: Trump channels inner socialist with Soviet-style price controls
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In 2010, Obama administration health-care advisers Nancy-Ann DeParle, Ezekiel Emanuel and Robert Kocher boasted about the Affordable Care Act in a letter published by the Annals of Internal Medicine: 'The economic forces put in motion by the act are likely to lead to vertical organization of providers and accelerate physician employment by hospitals and aggregation into larger physician groups.'
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Trump is embracing that same top-down approach, with medicine — in this case, the pharmaceutical industry — remaining nominally private, but subject to government command.
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As the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon, who literally wrote the book on reforming U.S. health care from a free-market perspective, points out, 'Trump's executive order is an attempt to impose government price controls on pharmaceuticals.' Cannon recommended regulatory reforms to get the government out of the health-care market. 'Price controls are never the answer,' he added.
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A major problem with price controls is that government can dictate a price, but it can't guarantee that anybody will produce and sell sufficient quantities of a good at that price. It also can't eliminate the consequences of putting a ceiling on prices and lowering incentives for developing new drugs.
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West Virginia University economics professor Chris Freiman elaborated on this point, arguing that, 'Drug price controls are a classic example of what is seen versus what is unseen.' What consumers will see, he noted, is cheaper drugs. But what they will never see is 'the drugs we would otherwise have benefited from but aren't created in the first place' because pharmaceutical companies fear price caps will reduce or eliminate the return on their investments.
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Republicans rightly criticized then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris when she proposed combating the inflation caused by wild spending during the Biden-Harris administration (and Trump's first term) by fixing prices. She promised to 'bring down prices' by taking on 'big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging and corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families.' Besides rent, she had a particular fixation on dictating grocery prices.
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Even the Washington Post's Democrat-friendly editorial board called Harris out, saying, 'Thankfully, this gambit by Ms. Harris has been met with almost instant skepticism, with many critics citing President Richard M. Nixon's failed price controls from the 1970s.'
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Unfortunately, Trump doesn't just share his predecessors' taste for price controls, he also emulates the Biden administration's appetite for government-directed industrial policy, with politicians planning economic development and picking winners and losers. Trump told reporters earlier this month about the supply choking effects of his tariff policies, saying, 'A 10-year-old girl, nine-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn't need 37 dolls.… She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.'
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His comments echoed socialist Vermont senator and former Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders' 2015 dismissal of 'a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers' in a free economy as unnecessary when he saw what he considered greater goals to pursue.
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Interestingly, Trump's secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said during the announcement of the drug price plan, 'I have a couple of kids who are Democrats or big Bernie Sanders fans, and when I told them that this was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes.'
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When a Republican president and his Democrat and socialist opponents agree more than they disagree about their desire for a planned economy, it's obvious that our political choices are as severely constrained as they would make our selection of dolls and deodorants. Americans may overwhelmingly reject central planning, but our major politicians are all socialists now.
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