Congressman Mike Ferguson (R) was a prime sponsor of the Medicare Part D prescription benefit which most folks find too expensive, confusing and problematic. It's so bad that the Weekly Standard, the weekly magazine of the conservative movement, notes (12/19/06) that few Republican members of Congress are willing to stand up and say that the program is a success. Few, that is, except Ferguson.
One exception is Rep. Mike Ferguson, the New Jersey Republican serving on the House Energy and Commerce committee. Ferguson recently lost his mother to multiple myeloma, but not before Celegene's Revlimid allowed her three more years of life. For him, the issue is passionately personal: "Price controls of any sort not only hurt seniors," he says. "They hurt our children and grandchildren who suffer with Parkinson's, cancer and juvenile diabetes."
This is disingenuous on more than one level. The first is that Ferguson's mother passed away more than three years ago, well before Medicare Part D took effect. The second is that his family makes more than enough money to pay for any prescriptions they needed, so much that Mike and each of his siblings was given a million dollars on their 30th birthday. Medicare is for families that need help more than for wealthy families like Ferguson's. I sympathize very much for the loss he suffered -- my mother passed away very young as well, and even after 13 years it is still painful -- but see no need to play on the voters' sympathies like he is doing.
The connection Ferguson and the writer make is that the incoming Democratic majority is likely to change Medicare Part D to allow the federal government to negotiate prices for the prescription drugs it purchases, bringing the cost of the program down and potentially expanding it for less money. The Veterans administration already negotiates prices for the drugs it purchases for retired soldiers, and nothing bad has happened. Any business that planned to purchase billions of dollars of a product would surely seek to find stability for the product it buys, but Ferguson seems to think this is "price controls."
It's not. Price controls are when the government tells a business or industry that it can only charge a certain price for certain products. The drug industry is free to charge whatever it wants on the open market no matter how the federal government negotiates its own prices. That is not price control for the industry, but cost controls for a purchaser.
The final and saddest comment is that Ferguson would pretend that negotiating costs with the industry will somehow stifle research and hurt "children and grandchildren who suffer with Parkinson's, cancer and juvenile diabetes."
Ferguson is a leading opponent of embryonic stem cell research, a promising new field that has specifically been mentioned in curing Parkinson's, cancer and juvenile diabetes. He is so vehemently opposed that he refused to meet with a 13 year old constituent with juvenile diabetes last year because she wanted to discuss stem cell research and told the mother of a paralyzed boy that her son would never walk and she should just admit it.
So Ferguson opposes spending federal money to find cures for these diseases, but suggests that the federal government negotiating prices for the drugs it buys will somehow halt research.
Wrong choices, wrong Congressman.
