This is the Kaderie Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 20th,

20th, 2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Biden doesn't like high drug prices, so he wants to assert on behalf of the

feds the power to give more than one

company the ability to produce on patent drugs. But what would the actual

impact of that be? And aren't there better ways to address the very real issue of expensive prescription drugs?

Cato's Peter Van Doren and Michael Cannon discuss the issue.

What is Joe Biden upset about with respect to the pricing of drugs that are produced in the United States.

The President is responding to a widespread concern that drug prices are excessive in the United

States. They are excessive in the United States.

They are excessive when you compare them to drug prices in other countries,

or they're high when you compare them to drug prices in other countries,

and they are high when you compare them to drug prices not too long ago.

You will often see dramatic increases in the prices of drugs that are not just new drugs that are still under patent but drugs that have been on the

market for a while will suddenly see large spikes in in price and one of the

things that strikes people as as inequitable about this is that sometimes drug manufacturers do rely from government spending on basic research, then take that knowledge that the taxpayers generate and profit off of

that by developing drugs and getting them approved and marketing them for these very high prices.

So President Biden is tapping into something that I think is very real that moves a lot of voters and something that does require some attention.

Peter, what does it cost to get drugs to market?

We presumably we have lots of drugs that never get to market

because the market was either small

or the research didn't pan out out didn't go the way that the

...