This is a great story and Trump is to be commended in his selection to run the FDA. Scott Gottlieb is a fine physician who knows this area well and can sharply articulate efforts to alter the problems in this agency.

Scott Gottlieb, Trump pick for FDA, is on the side of the little guy

WASHINGTON EXAMINER

March 14,2017

President Trump’s pick for the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, is qualified and capable. He will do great work if confirmed, but his nomination provides a great opportunity to lay out a crucial lesson that regulation often serves to protect big business from competition, harming the consumer.

The Democrats’ attack on Gottlieb is easy to predict. Reporters have already provided the template. “He is seen as a strong supporter of [the pharmaceutical] industry and has championed deregulation,” NPR wrote in a story.

NPR also cited Gottlieb’s lucrative consulting for drug companies, and quoted a liberal critic saying, “He has spent most of his career dedicated to promoting the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Senate must reject him.”

This is standard stuff from Democrats and Left-liberal media, of which NPR is a leading member. They always simplistically see arguments against regulation as helping corporate interests.

Gottlieb’s scholarly work, however, shows the truth is different. He is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute — disclosure: so are Washington Examiner writers Michael Barone and Tim Carney — and has chronicled consolidation in the hospital and insurance industry, and argues that regulation has contributed to the trend. He’s also shown how regulations dampen competition in pharmaceutical industry.

Obamacare regulations, for instance, prevent new entrants into the health insurance markets, thus protecting incumbent insurers from competition, Gottlieb argues. He points out that the law regulations governing how much an insurer may spend on overhead and marketing penalize a new company for its start-up costs. “Spending on things like marketing a new plan to consumers, developing provider networks, and credentialing doctors” are effectively punished by these regulations because they don’t count as “medical” spending.

Further, “new carriers also have a hard time bearing the fixed costs of compliance.” Smarter and lighter regulation would allow more competition. Incumbent insurers might not like this, but customers would.

The same goes for hospitals. Obamacare “favor[s] the consolidation of previously independent doctors into salaried roles inside larger institutions,” Gottlieb wrote in 2014, “usually tied to a central hospital, in effect ending independent medical practices.”

Gottlieb argued against the hospitals’ dominance: “A true legislative alternative to Obamacare would support physician ownership of independent medical practices, and preserve local competition between doctors and choice for patients.”
Obamacare’s regulations and subsidies dampened such competition.

And drugmakers? The largest drug lobby, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America supported Obamacare, as did the American Hospital Association. So Gottlieb and the drug lobby are not of the same mind on major issues.

Second, Gottlieb’s proposed reforms of the drug industry generally aim at getting more competition, often in the form of generic drugs, to drive down prices and profit margins.

In August 2016, Gottlieb wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “a flurry of new regulations is raising production costs and reducing competition for branded drugs. The key to the generic-drug economic model is to keep entry prices low enough to attract multiple competitors.”

Gottlieb’s central goal in policy prescriptions has been more competition in a sector where it is scarce. A major barrier to entry and a major cause of consolidation has been regulation.

This is true not only in the health sector, of course. Banking has consolidated further under Dodd-Frank regulations. Major tax preparers such as H&R Block supported Obama-administration regulations on their industry in order to crowd out smaller practitioners. Mattel supported federal toy regulations and Philip Morris supported regulation of tobacco.

But no sector needs an injection of market competition as badly as healthcare does. Republicans would do well to remember that when fighting for market reform of healthcare, industry is not a reliable ally.

Gottlieb deserves rapid confirmation to head this crucial agency. We hope the Trump administration can learn from this that more regulation often means less competition, protecting the big guys instead of everyone else.

A Chilling Article on the Possible Destruction of France As We Know It. Take It Seriously. It Could Even Happen Here.

France’s Fatal Attraction to Islam

by Giulio Meotti
March 4, 2017

Instead of fighting to save what is savable, French opinion-makers are already writing the terms of surrender.

By hybridizing cultures and rejecting Christianity, France will soon end up not even teaching also Arabic, but only Arabic, and marking Ramadan instead of Easter.

Instead of wasting their time trying to organize an “Islam of France”, French political leaders, opinion makers and think tanks should look for ways to counter the creeping Islamization of their country. Otherwise, we may soon be seeing not only a “Grand Imam de France”, but also lashes and stonings on the Champs Élysées.

Two years ago, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, suggested converting empty churches into mosques, to accommodate the growing Muslim community in abandoned Christian sites. Now, many people in France seem to have taken the idea so seriously that a report released by the foundation Terra Nova, France’s main think tank that provides ideas to the governing Socialist Party, suggests that in order to integrate Muslims better, French authorities should replace the two Catholic holidays — Easter Monday and Pentecost — with Islamic holidays. To be ecumenical, they also included a Jewish holiday.

Written by Alain Christnacht and Marc-Olivier Padis, the study, “The Emancipation of Islam of France,” states: “In order to treat all the denominations equally, it should include two important new holidays, Yom Kippur and Eid el Kebir, with the removal of two Mondays that do not correspond to particular solemnity”.

Thus, Easter and Pentecost can be sacrificed to keep the ever-elusive multicultural “peace”.

Terra Nova’s proposal was rejected by the Episcopal Conference of France, but endorsed by the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which would also like to include the Islamic holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha in the calendar. The idea of replacing the Christian holidays was also sponsored by the Observatory of Secularism, an organ created by President François Hollande to coordinate secularist policies. The Observatory of Secularism also proposed eliminating some Christian holidays to make way for the Islamic, Jewish and secular holidays. “France must replace two Christian holidays to make way for the Yom Kippur and Eid,” said Dounia Bouzar, a member of the Observatory.

In his recent book, Will the Church Bells Ring Tomorrow?, Philippe de Villiers notes the disappearance of churches in France, and their replacement by mosques. Pictured above: On August 3, 2016, French riot police dragged a priest and his congregation from the church of St Rita in Paris, prior to its scheduled demolition. Front National leader Marine Le Pen said in fury: “And what if they built parking lots in the place of Salafist mosques, and not of our churches?” (Image source: RT video screenshot)

“France is no longer a Catholic country”, wrote Frederic Lenoir, editor-in-chief of Le Monde des Religions. The newspaper Le Figaro wondered if Islam can already be considered “France’s prime religion.” Instead of fighting to save what is savable, French opinion-makers are already writing the terms of surrender. That is the meaning of Terra Nova’s proposal.

A similar shocking idea came from another think tank, the Montaigne Institute, which provides ideas to another presidential candidate, Emmanuel Macron. In its report, written by Hakim El Karoui, the Montaigne Institute proposed the creation of a “Grand Imam of France”, no less, as if Paris and Cairo would have the same historic roots. Macron recently apologized for French colonialism, feeding a defeatist sense of guilt that fuels Islamic extremists in their demands.

The Montaigne Institute has also suggested teaching Arabic in public schools. This idea was also sponsored by Jack Lang, president of the Institute of the Arab world, who stated, “the Arab world is part of us”. By hybridizing cultures and rejecting Christianity, France will soon end up not even teaching also Arabic, but only Arabic, and Ramadan instead of Easter.

If the goal is accommodating Muslims in the French Republic instead of assimilating them, why not ban pork in the schools, avoid sensitive subjects such as the Crusades and the Holocaust, separate men and women in swimming pools, call cartoonists to “responsibility,” and allow Islamic veils in the public administration? In fact, all these things are taking place in France today. And the result is not “emancipation,” but religious segregation.

It is in this Apartheid that Islamic extremists grow and permeate hearts and minds. France’s director-general of intelligence, Patrick Calvar, has been clear: “The confrontation is inevitable,” he said. There are an estimated 15,000 Salafists among France’s seven million Muslims, “whose radical-fundamentalist creed dominates many of the predominantly Muslim housing projects at the edges of cities such as Paris, Nice or Lyon. Their preachers call for a civil war, with all Muslims tasked to wipe out the infidels down the street”.

The Socialist front-runner for the Presidential elections, Benoit Hamon, to whom the Terra Nova’s report was directed, even justified the disappearance of French women from the cafés in Muslim-majority areas: “Historically, in the workers’ cafes, there were no women,” he said.

Instead of wasting their time trying to organize an “Islam of France”, French political leaders, opinion-makers and think tanks should look for ways to counter the creeping Islamization of their country. Otherwise we may soon be seeing not only a “Grand Imam de France”, but also lashes and stonings on the Champs Élysées.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.