AT THIS POINT, ISN’T THE REAL QUESTION WHAT PRESIDENT BIDEN WOULD DO? Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Mess Up Prescription Economics.

Hillary Clinton thinks drug development should be riskier, and less profitable. Also, your health insurance premiums should be higher. And there should be fewer drugs available.

This is not, of course, how the Clinton campaign would put it. The official line is that Americans are just paying too darn much for drugs, and she has a plan to stop that. . . .

Eliminating the side payments seems eminently sensible. (Yes, yes, you can strip my libertarian card, but market-rigging contracts shouldn’t be enforced.) It also seems reasonable to require some sort of comparative effectiveness research. Other provisions will certainly drive down drug prices, at the risk of also driving down innovation.

Still other provisions, however, are simply bad economics. In what other market do we worry about having a second product available that’s merely just as good as the first? Should we really only have one antidepressant, one statin, one blood pressure medication, and so forth? Might there be variation among patients so that drugs that are statistically about equally effective in large groups are nonetheless individually more or less effective for different people? Might one drug’s side effects be better tolerated by some patients than another’s? Might having two drugs in the category help keep prices down?

Then there is notion that we should force pharmaceutical companies to spend a set percentage of their revenues on R&D. This seems to me to be … what’s the word I am looking for? Ah, I’ve got it: “insane.”

For one thing, compared to virtually any other industry, pharmaceutical companies already spend an enormous fraction of their revenues on R&D. Why assume that it ought to be higher? Or even more risibly, exactly the same at every company?

Because you’ve never run a business in your life? Related: Obamacare’s Nonprofit Insurers Are Failing, Predictably.