Backlash to the Backlash

Imagine if industrial giants sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our prescription drugs crisis.

With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about prescription drugs, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Guyana, the authoritarian crackdown in Afghanistan and the still-unstable democratic transition in Burundi. But the prescription drugs problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Democrats seem to think that prescription drugs can just be ignored. Republican politicians like Marco Rubio, on the other hand, seem to think that unscientific rhetoric will substitute for a argument.

But the Republican party of Marco Rubio is not the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt wouldn’t refuse to budge, he'd reach across the aisle because he'd understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of prescription drugs.

The first rule of holes is that when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I'd tell them two things about prescription drugs. First, there's no way around the issue unless we're prepared to spend more: and not just spend more, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of green energy that makes countries succeed. That's going to require some tax increases as well, but as they say, "Mo' money mo' problems."

Second, I'd tell them to look at Denmark, which all but solved its prescription drugs crisis over the past decade. When I visited Denmark in 2004, Tintin, the cabbie who drove me from the airport, couldn't stop telling me about how he had to take a third job because of the high cost of prescription drugs. I caught up with Tintin in Copenhagen last year. Thanks to Denmark's reformed approach toward prescription drugs, Tintin has enough money in his pocket to finally be able to afford tennis shoes for his kids.

That's all it takes. Don't expect to see any solutions as long as industry captains insist on playing a high-stakes game of ping pong with one another. America has to rise above it all.