Re: why shouldn't your patients ...

Ralph Kennedy wrote:
stephenj <sjek@xxxxxxx> writes:

Jon Enslin wrote:

alicamdun@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


It is no different than the government requiring WalMart to carry
both low-fat and regular Oreos. Or demanding that they start
selling a certain brand of tea.

You are wrong. Those are not regulated products. Pharmaceutical drugs
are.

if the government decided to make oreos regulated products, forcing wal-mart to carry those kinds wouldn't be any less silly than it is now.


You're both missing the point. Regulation alone
isn't the issue,

who said it is, other than all the folks on your side who keep babbling about "the state regulates pharmacies" as if that makes any regulation, no matter how silly, ipso fatso legitimate, or "it's a priviledge, not a right, to sell drugs", etc..?

or else you could argue that the state
could force Wal-Mart to carry Dewar's White Label scotch
if it had a liquor license.

that's about where your side's argument is at this point. let's see if you can improve on it.

What matters is that
pharmacies are licensed to provide a critical medical
service, to wit, to fill prescriptions deemed necessary
for a patient, so if a patient presents with a valid
prescription, it is incumbent upon the pharmacist to
either give the patient what the prescripton calls for
from stock on hand, or order it for him.

ok, now you've made some progress. the notion that a patient has a "medical need" for a product sounds like a compelling reason for saying "if you want to be in the business of selling drugs, you have to sell this drug too". of course balanced against that we have the general right of a firm to make choices about what to sell, whether on profit/loss grounds, moral grounds, whatever.

so under what conditions should the patient's need outweigh the right of the firm to decide what to sell?

how about:

(1) if the need is "critical", that is, the patient will suffer significant bodily harm if they don't have access to the drug, and

(2) if market conditions are such that if the firm we want to compel to do so won't carry it, the patient won't have access to it (i.e., the firm has a monopoly).

if both conditions hold, then the regulation is justified, because the patient has a legitimate need for the item and the need can't be met if the firm in question doesn't meet it.

in this wal-mart/massachusetts case, neither of those conditions applies. concerning (1) the "morning after" pill is a contraceptive. it doesn't treat injury or disease, etc. so there is no "critical medical need" for it. concerning (2), wal-mart doesn't have a monopoly on pharmacy services in massachusetts, so customers can get the product from other pharmacies. and that's how they've been getting it. from the article:

"CVS, the state's largest pharmacy chain, stocks the pill at all of its pharmacy locations, as do the state's other major pharmacy chains."

so your "market failure" notion fails here.

thus, there's no grounds for compelling wal-mart in massachusetts to provide the morning after pill.

In a conservative fundamentalist county, if
pharmacists got to pick and choose which prescriptions
they wanted to fill, then they all could refuse to carry
certain prescriptions, making them unavailable in the
entire county--so much for Jaros's "theory" that the
marketplace would take care of everything.

don't confuse the market "taking care" of something with "getting your way". and anyway, that's a hypothetical that doesn't apply to this case.



--
"when i visited Aden before collectivization,
all the markets were full of fish product. After
collectivization, the fish immediately disappeared."

- Aleksandr Vassiliev, Soviet KGB official
.

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