Correction, please!

Abortion Politics

ITEM: Following President Bush's State of the Union address, Tom Shales of the Washington Post commented on January 29th: "Not by nature a gifted public speaker, Bush did well for the most part, warming up himself and the crowd with a semi-ambitious domestic agenda (with, as a sop to the far right, a call for an end to 'partial-birth abortions')...."

CORRECTION: Dismissing resistance to killing nearly born babies as a political gesture is indicative of the Post's prejudices. But opposition is not restricted to the "far right." For example, a mid-January poli conducted by CNN/USA Today--hardly conservative organs--asked whether respondents favored or opposed certain proposals, including: 'A law which would make it illegal to perform a specific abortion procedure conducted in the last six months of pregnancy known as a 'partial-birth abortion,' except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother." Favoring such a law was an overwhelming 70 percent.

Prescribing Bad Medicine

ITEM: Describing a boom in cross-border prescription drug sales, an article in the Baltimore Sun for January 26th insinuates that price controls are helping U.S. consumers. "Canada regulates drug prices as part of its national health care system, while the market dictates pricing in the United States," says a wire-service account. "Many popular medications for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol can be bought in Canada at less than half the U.S. price."

CORRECTION: Canada is far from a healthcare utopia, and its citizens routinely cross the border to get better treatment in the U.S. Little wonder. The average wait after a general practitioner in Canada makes a referral and when a specialist is consulted is 16.5 weeks, according to the British Columbia-based Fraser Institute. Another 9.2 weeks goes by before actual treatment.

One reason that some drugs are less expensive in Canada is that Canada freeloads on U.S. research. Nevertheless, as noted in the February 3rd issue of Forbes, "21 of 27 top-selling generics cost more in Canada than in the U.S., reports a study of the lowest available prices" by Ottawa-based Palmer D'Angelo Consulting.

Price controls in Canada, as always, are a prescription for harm. All Canadian taxpayers subsidize seemingly lower prices. Syndicated columnist Donald Lambro points out that Canadians shell out more than 35 percent of their income "to finance the government's welfare state programs." This hurts more than the pocketbook. When the government mandates discounts, eventually care suffers. For example, some 30 percent of doctors in British Columbia in a recent survey said that their patients wound up in hospitals because the physicians were forced to substitute government-mandated drugs for treatment.

Citizens for a Sound Economy, a Washington-based opponent of socialized health care, explains that when the government buys drugs, as in Canada, "it must ration them. With no private-sector alternatives, patients have no choice but to accept what their government--not their doctor--decides is best."

Indeed, because of market interference, a number of new drug treatments for such conditions as hypertension and cancer are simply unavailable in Canada. That's the ultimate discount.

Asbestos Suits' Hot Profits

ITEM: A prominent lawyer disputed the damage caused by asbestos-use lawsuits. Fred Baron, senior partner of Dallas-based Baron & Budd PC, told the Dallas Business Journal for January 27th, "I don't know of any companies that have laid off employees as a result of asbestos-related Chapter 11s. The people getting hurt are shareholders."

CORRECTION: It strains credulity to think that no jobs have been lost when, as recent studies have shown, "nearly 60 companies are in bankruptcy protection due to asbestos claims, while asbestos-related litigation costs could reach $275 bn," as reported by the Financial Times. Ambulance chasers are throwing a wide net. Consider one recent lawsuit against 73 defendants. Claims were made against any company that "manufactured, sold, designed, supplied, distributed, mined, milled, relabeled" asbestos-containing materials. As the Wall Street Journal noted: "About 35 of the defendants were contractors or operators who didn't use asbestos directly."

It's not just investors being hurt. While many lawyers are getting wealthy milking the system, according to the Rand Institute, the most seriously ill of the alleged victims are only getting a bit more than a third of the compensation. Dr. Richard Bohannon, past president of the American Cancer Society, explained in the San Francisco Business Times that many lawyers are opting for consolidated lawsuits. Such actions "combine a few sick victims with hundreds, or thousands, of healthy petitioners. These cases often generate settlements that pay each plaintiff relatively equally, despite the fact that it is the sick who need compensation to combat enormous medical expenses."

--WILLIAM P. HOAR