Commentary: Quit Complaining About Drug Prices

Jan. 18 -- Go ahead, be upset and complain about the price of prescription drugs. Punish the drug companies. But then where are you going to get the drugs?

Lots of people are very upset about the price of medicine. And who can blame them? They're sick, they may need medicine to live, and yet it costs so much.

And when people are upset, politicians are quick to join the attack on drug companies.

Sen. David Pryor, D-Ark., called them the "robber barons of the American health care system."

Politicians have made commercials demonizing the drug companies, and many rail against them on Capitol Hill.

Listening to these politicians makes me wonder: Do they ever stop to think about how we get these wonderful drugs?

Miracles Take Time and Money

They don't just suddenly appear. Drug companies hire thousands of researchers who try to invent good things. Most fail.

But the few successes are worth it. Do you remember what life was like before the polio vaccine? Millions lived in polio wards, or need iron lungs to try to breathe. Those who think drugs are expensive should compare them to the cost of treating diseases like polio.

And those hated drug companies keep making life better.

Ten years ago, when people like Bo Jackson got hip replacements, we thought it was a miracle, and it was. But the operation was painful. Four years later, there was a drug available that sometimes eliminated the need for an operation. The drug costs $700 a year, which may seem expensive. But the operation cost $50,000 and it's not as good!

And the drug companies keep bringing us new miracles. Lance Armstrong's cancer drug cost $15,000, but as he says in the commercials for Brystol-Meyers Squibb: "If I had had this illness 20 years ago, I wouldn't be alive right now. I wouldn't have lived six months."

But these successes are the exception. For every success, there are a thousand failures.

Like my older brother Tom's. He's a skilled medical researcher who's worked for Harvard Medical School, and recently, for a pharmaceutical company that accepted his idea for a drug that they hoped would help people with cystic fibrosis breathe more easily.