Demonizing Drug and Oil Companies - Not Just the Democrats Playbook
MCCAIN: ... have sued the pharmaceutical companies because of overcharging of millions of dollars of Medicaid costs to their patients.
MCCAIN: How could that happen? How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?
It’s because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. We should have pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.
ROMNEY: OK, don’t leave me. Don’t send the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.
MCCAIN: Well, they are.
ROMNEY: No, actually they’re trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they’re doing the work of the free market.
And are there excesses? I’m sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they’re an important industry to this country.
But let me note something else, and that is the market will work. And the reason health care isn’t working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, “I’m not going to play. I’m just going to get free care paid for by everybody else.” That doesn’t work.
Number two, the buyer doesn’t have information about what the cost or quality is, or different choices they could have. If you take the government out of it to a much greater extent, you’d get it to work like a market and it will rein in cost.
McCain is saying the same things that Huckabee is saying in their pandering to the masses and the populist rhetoric. It is important to note these kind of statements as one can expect that McCain and Huckabee will take on drug and oil companies, though with less veracity than the Dems. But the thinking is still the same.
Calling himself “a different kind of Republican,” Huckabee often appears to be channeling John Edwards or Lou Dobbs. He rails against high corporate profits and attacks free trade agreements. As governor, he raised the minimum wage and increased business regulation. He says it is “a biblical duty” to pass more regulation to fight global warming.
