Morton Kondracke: Bush's budget, Democrats' vows could be dangerous to your health

[Murray Charters <mcharters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Morton Kondracke: Bush's budget, Democrats' vows could be dangerous to your 
health
By MORTON KONDRACKE, Newspaper Enterprise Association
February 27, 2004

If you or a loved one suffers from cancer, heart disease, diabetes or another 
dread disease ? or you fear you might
contract one ? you have a hard choice when you vote for president this year.

President Bush is cutting the budget for medical research that might find a 
cure for your disease. At the same time,
the Democratic frontrunner, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., wants to strangle the 
revenues of the pharmaceutical companies
who'd develop a medicine to treat you.

Between the two of them, they're a deadly duo. And Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., 
would be little better. He's joining in
his party's jihad against drug companies.

Actually, it is possible to identify the most dangerous of the candidates. It's 
Bush, who has a Republican Congress
likely to do his budget bidding and give the National Institutes of Health a 
mere 2.7 percent funding increase this
year ? a cut after biomedical inflation is taken into account.

In future years, the Bush administration plans to increase medical research 
funding by 2 percent or less ? with almost
all of the increase going for obviously necessary programs to combat 
bioterrorism. The budget allocations mean cuts in
research for all other diseases.

Bush administration officials assert that because the NIH budget was doubled 
over the five fiscal years from 1999 to
2003, the agency can't absorb any further increases.

But that's like arguing that because members of a malnourished family got more 
than 2,000 calories a day for a week,
they can't take an adequate diet anymore and have to be starved in the future.

In fact, the true situation is worse than in that analogy. With the budget 
increasing at 15 percent per year for five
years, universities and other research institutions opened labs, started 
projects and hired scientists that now will be
closed, stopped and let go.

"It's going to cause an ice age for medical research," according to William 
Langston, director of the Parkinson's
Institute in Sunnyvale, Calif., and scientific director of the Michael J. Fox 
Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
(Disclosure: I'm on Fox's board.)

According to Langston, "Young scientists who were attracted to medical research 
are just going to have to go into some
other line of work if these cuts go through."

The combination of NIH funding increases to $27 billion this year and annual 
research outlays of $100 billion by drug
and biotechnology companies have produced some amazing results over the past 
several years ? progress that will be
slowed or halted if either Bush or Kerry has his way.

HIV/AIDS is no longer necessarily fatal, saving an estimated 62,000 lives in 
2000, according to NIH's director, Elias
Zerhouni. New treatments for stroke prevented 241,000 deaths and for coronary 
heart disease, 815,000.

Major new strides also have been made in treating adult and childhood leukemia, 
Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and
schizophrenia. And the mapping of the human genome opens the way for 
discovering the causes ? and, potentially, the
cures ? for numerous diseases.

There is a problem on the cures front, however. According to outgoing Food and 
Drug Administrator Mark McClellan, the
number of new patent applications from drug companies has dropped precipitously 
? presumably because research
discoveries are not being efficiently converted into medicines.

McClellan, newly named to head the federal Medicare program, says he has ideas 
on how to free up the process of drug
development. One of them should be ? but probably won't be ? adoption of Sen. 
Joe Lieberman's, D-Conn., proposal to
create an Agency for Cures to translate bench-science discoveries into 
treatments.

The slowdown of new-drug development is not an excuse either for the Bush 
administration to stifle discovery or for
Democrats to inhibit drug companies' ability to conduct research.

Kerry and Edwards regularly attack drug companies for "price gouging," 
neglecting to observe that it costs an average
of $700 million to bring a new drug to market.

Kerry wants to, in effect, impose price controls on drugs by allowing the 
government to "negotiate" with drug companies
on behalf of the Medicare and Medicaid program and by legalizing mass 
importation of drugs from Canada.

However, Medicare does not "negotiate" with providers such as doctors and 
hospitals on reimbursement levels. It imposes
them, and Congress often gets into the act of changing formulas.

And, the reason that drugs are cheaper in Canada and Europe is that governments 
there fix prices based on the
production cost of new drugs, escaping participation in the astronomical cost 
of drug development.

McClellan, probably the most imaginative health expert in the Bush 
administration, has tried to lower drug prices in
the United States by speeding the availability of generic drugs and to convince 
foreign countries to make greater use
of generics and stop underpaying for new brand-name drugs.

Steps do need to be taken to lower the cost of drugs to consumers. One is for 
the consumers and physicians to have up-
to-date information on the efficacy and cost of one drug versus another, so 
that their decisions are not swayed simply
by advertising or drug company promotions.

However, under Bush's budget, the Agency for Health Research and Quality, the 
office responsible for improving
information systems, has received no increase in funding at all.

In fact, as part of Bush's effort to continue cutting taxes and satisfy his 
conservative, anti-deficit, anti-"spending"
base by controlling domestic discretionary spending ? just 17 percent of the 
federal budget ? Bush has put a hold on
almost all civilian scientific research. That's a failure to invest in the 
future. And, it's dangerous to your health.

(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol 
Hill.)

RELATED STORIES:

Morton Kondracke: Bush shrugs as Dems raise health care issue


Morton Kondracke: Bush's '04 plan should be a healthy U.S


SOURCE: Naples Daily News, FL


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