Daily Archives: February 24, 2006

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The Daniel Weintraub Health Care Challenge

As a quick follow-up to my post about Daniel Weintraub’s self-insurance advocacy, I offer a challenge.  Weintraub’s employer has an editorial today concerning the price of health care:

Avistan as a colon cancer medicine has been costing about $50,000 a year. The cost of the same medicine as a breast and lung cancer treatment is expected to be $100,000 a year.

The dosage will be higher for these treatments, but the incremental increase in manufacturing cost is minimal. So what’s going on?

Genentech is signaling that the higher price to treat breast cancer reflects the higher value society places on fighting this disease. That’s different; the usual pharmaceutical industry response is that the high prices are necessary to recover the research and development costs.

That’s the free market in action, Mr. Weintraub.  Breast cancer is pricier than colon cancer.  Now, I don’t know anything about Mr. Weintraub’s financial situation, or his family’s.  But let’s imagine that his wife, mother, or sister is looking at a minimum $100K bill just for this pharmaceutical treatment for breast cancer.

I wonder if he’d so glibly to dismiss health insurance then?  Or is Mr. Weintraub’s family so rich that they would never feel a $100K bill for a drug?  If so, he doesn’t have much business lecturing the rest of us about how we ought to pay out of pocket for our medical care.

Bay Area, San Francisco

SF Handgun Ban: Days in Court

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As night follows day, so does a lawsuit from the NRA follow any regulation of guns at any level of government.  And so, the City of San Francisco finds itself defending Proposition H, the ban on handgun sales and ownership within city limits.  I’m not going to bother quoting any of the article here, as it’s fairly predictable; this diary is more in the way of a confession. 

I’m a bad liberal on gun issues.  I was among the 42% of the city residents who voted against Proposition H, mostly for the following reasons:

1.  It won’t do any good to ban handguns within city limits.  San Francisco is about 7 miles on a side, and you can be in rural counties in an hour’s drive.  If one is serious about handgun control, one has to deal with it not just statewide, but nationwide, and that simply will not happen, given the power of the gun lobby in most of the rural states that control national policy.

2.  Given that it won’t do any good to ban handguns within city limits, why, for the love of Pete, is the City of San Francisco poking the NRA?  Why did the City feel compelled to create yet another talking point for Republicans in the middle of the country?  And why are they spending my tax dollars on this fight?

Honestly, the gun regulation battle is pretty much over in this country for a generation at least.  I’m not saying states and municipalities shouldn’t pass reasonable regulations, but symbolic moves like Proposition H aren’t helping anyone.