Karl Smith has an odd response to my post last night about Abbott Labs and its efforts to make sure that a generic version of TriCor would never see the light of day:
This is a part of a longer point but it’s important to note that it’s not clear that health care costs were raised as a part of this….Mostly it seems that at worst money was transferred from consumers and taxpayers to TriCor. This is not an economic cost. It is simply redistribution.
….However, as generally used the phrase “high health care costs” doesn’t refer to anything that makes any economic sense and so it’s not clear what the appropriate remedy is. I would like to encourage people to be more explicit about the real problems that they perceive rather than extensive references to large scale accounting issues.
Just for the record, then: when I say “high healthcare costs,” what I mean is “lots of money flowing to heathcare entities.” I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone else means too. I know that Karl likes to be contrarian, but calling this a mere large-scale accounting issue is surely a little bit too Olympian even for him, isn’t it?
