Politics: No on prop 78, No on prop 79

The two proposals are intended to make prescription drugs more available to low-income people.

Who can be against that?

BUT, should those kinds of program be created by ballot box?

That just doesn't make sense to me.

And If I'm reading it right, on page 42-43 of the voter guide, it says that people already can get medications through Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, private insurance and soon through Medicare. Seems to me, we have various ways to get them discounted to some degrees already?

It is easy to demonize the drug companies. But since I work in molecular biology research (at a non-profit research institute), I know from first hand experience how slow progress can be. Thus, I don't begrudge a drug company their profits when finally one drug makes it big when so many others turn out to be dead ends.

In the lab, it is one thing to find a compound that can solve a problem in a test tube. Kill a bacteria in a test tube? Great! Now, can you give it to a person without killing the person or causing some other problem?

Package it into a pill ... how big should the dose be? How much gets absorbed once you take it? It takes time and money to figure that out.

How often do you take the pills? You need to figure out how long it lasts in your body before it breaks down and is useless? Trained scientists do these experiments and use all kinds of expensive equipment to make the analysis.

Now you have in your hand a candidate drug.

You have to fund trials to prove effectiveness and safety.

You have to figure out how to mass produce the drug once you determine it will actually work. That means building a factory or modifying an existing one to make the drug. And with manufacturing you have to have quality control tests to make sure what you think you are making is what you are really making.

Drugs don't mysteriously show up in the Walgreens with the morning dew. Each drug you have in your cabinet is the product of many many many human hours of labor.

I say again, I don't begrudge a drug company their profits when finally one drug makes it big when so many others turn out to be dead ends.

We already have programs in place to help low income people get medicines. If we need to improve those programs, let's do that. But to come up with new programs by ballot just doesn't make sense to me.

The Sacramento Bee urges a No vote on both Prop 78 and 79. Excerpt:

Proposition 78 is the pharmaceutical industry's approach... The program would allow families without drug insurance earning up to $58,050 a year to sign up for a drug card for cheaper drugs. If companies didn't voluntarily offer enough discounted drugs, however, the program would die. If the program were locked in place due to this initiative, the Legislature would be hard-pressed to make any necessary changes. For any "voluntary" approach to succeed, the Legislature would have to be in charge, not the drug companies through this initiative.
.......
Proposition 79 seeks to lower drug prices for a broader group of uninsured patients - families earning up to $77,000 - by requiring the state to negotiate on their behalf. Already the state negotiates drug prices for extremely low-income residents who quality for the state/federal Medi-Cal health program. Proposition 79 threatens to make it harder for those Medi-Cal patients to obtain certain drugs if the companies that make the drugs don't lower their prices for the uninsured.
.......
The real winners, most likely, would be lawyers. Proposition 79 would create a new civil action against drug companies that sell products at "an unconscionable price." Of course, unconscionable is not defined. It would be left to lawyers, the lawsuits and the courts to continually define what unconscionable means.

Endless lawsuits would only increase the costs for the drug companies and make the underlying problem even worse.

This blogger recommends a No on prop 78 and a No on prop 79.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times has come out against both prop 78 and prop 79!