Well, not exactly the Beltway this time, but instead a member of the D.C. Council, David A. Catania, who without any doubt at all looks in the mirror and sees Senator Catania. After all, they all drink the same water. Anyway, Comrade Catania now proposes to license pharmaceutical sales representatives, in an effort to rein in "disreputable agents who drive up the costs of prescription drugs."
Got that? Restricting the supply of reps through licensing will reduce costs! And how will this bit of alchemy be achieved? Elementary, Watson: No longer will we have pharmaceutical representatives who can "mislead doctors and patients into buying the most expensive drugs on the market, shunning reasonably priced generics or drugs that could be just as effective." After all, sayeth the deep-thinking Catania, "the agents' salaries are dependent on sales, [so that] they sometimes give the wrong impressions about drugs and present themselves as medical professionals."
So there we have it. Doctors who are licensed are fools, but pharmaceutical representatives who are licensed are wise and scrupulous. Oh, by the way, since Comrade Catania seems not to propose a change in the way that "the agents' salaries" are determined, it is not quite clear how licensing would change their incentives. And speaking of which, incentives for deception are far weaker than Catania assumes, given that the reps and the pharmaceutical producers have ongoing relationships with the medical providers, so that deception now carries a real risk of damaged business tomorrow. After all, do the representatives not place some value on their credibility? And, of course, there is the FDA: Is Catania oblivious to the fact that the reps are not allowed to make claims not approved by the FDA? Perhaps Catania is generalizing from the record of dishonesty observed eternally in the world of politics---the D.C. government is not exactly a model of good-government progress---a possibility magnified by the view of reality shaped by a lifetime outside the real world.
More wisdom from Comrade Catania: "If [licensing] is good enough for cosmetologists, it ought to be good enough for the pharamceutical company." Catania, naturally, has this precisely backward: Just as market forces are quite sufficient to lead cosmetologists toward honest behavior, so the same is true for pharamceutical representatives, who have to deal with physicians and others who are not idiots. But Catania must truly believe that they are idiots, just as the political class believes that the rest of us are children rather than citizens. That we have to pay their salaries is a monument to the perversities of that sausage factory known as lawmaking.
[cross-posted from www.medicalprogresstoday.com/blog/]
Got that? Restricting the supply of reps through licensing will reduce costs! And how will this bit of alchemy be achieved? Elementary, Watson: No longer will we have pharmaceutical representatives who can "mislead doctors and patients into buying the most expensive drugs on the market, shunning reasonably priced generics or drugs that could be just as effective." After all, sayeth the deep-thinking Catania, "the agents' salaries are dependent on sales, [so that] they sometimes give the wrong impressions about drugs and present themselves as medical professionals."
So there we have it. Doctors who are licensed are fools, but pharmaceutical representatives who are licensed are wise and scrupulous. Oh, by the way, since Comrade Catania seems not to propose a change in the way that "the agents' salaries" are determined, it is not quite clear how licensing would change their incentives. And speaking of which, incentives for deception are far weaker than Catania assumes, given that the reps and the pharmaceutical producers have ongoing relationships with the medical providers, so that deception now carries a real risk of damaged business tomorrow. After all, do the representatives not place some value on their credibility? And, of course, there is the FDA: Is Catania oblivious to the fact that the reps are not allowed to make claims not approved by the FDA? Perhaps Catania is generalizing from the record of dishonesty observed eternally in the world of politics---the D.C. government is not exactly a model of good-government progress---a possibility magnified by the view of reality shaped by a lifetime outside the real world.
More wisdom from Comrade Catania: "If [licensing] is good enough for cosmetologists, it ought to be good enough for the pharamceutical company." Catania, naturally, has this precisely backward: Just as market forces are quite sufficient to lead cosmetologists toward honest behavior, so the same is true for pharamceutical representatives, who have to deal with physicians and others who are not idiots. But Catania must truly believe that they are idiots, just as the political class believes that the rest of us are children rather than citizens. That we have to pay their salaries is a monument to the perversities of that sausage factory known as lawmaking.
[cross-posted from www.medicalprogresstoday.com/blog/]
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