Goose-killers.(Gil Gutknecht, Byron Dorgan propose price controls on pharmaceutical industry)

THE latest crusade in Washington seeks to do to the pharmaceutical-drug industry what trial lawyers and Naderites did to the tobacco and asbestos producers in the 1990s: demonize them and then milk them dry of every dollar of profits. A key difference, of course, is that while tobacco and asbestos are dangerous to human health, drugs save lives--millions of them. It would be difficult to identify a single industry that has done more over the past century to improve life on earth.

That's not the way Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R., Minn.) and most of his congressional colleagues see it. Gutknecht has been shouting about the high prices of prescription drugs and he routinely lambastes the industry for "shameful profiteering." He and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) are advancing legislation to impose a back-door form of price controls on the drug industry. In the wake of last year's Medicare prescription-drug-benefit bill, the price-controls bill is now sprinting through Congress.

The drug industry has itself partially to blame for this fiasco. The pharmaceutical association foolishly supported the Medicare expansion bill, and should have seen this train wreck coming. It didn't take a great stretch of the imagination to predict that once the government became a primary payer for prescription drugs, it would not be long before Congress felt an irresistible urge to begin regulating the prices. (Government has already imposed price controls on many doctor and hospital services paid for by Medicare.)

One proposal currently gaining steam would repeal a federal law that prevents the government from setting drug prices. An even more insidious bill in the Senate would not only allow the reimportation of drugs from Canada at their government-controlled cut-rate prices, but require U.S. drug firms to sell as many of the drugs as the Canadians want at that price. This forced-sales ...