His drug-price plan avoids hard decisions and attacks the wrong targets.<\/b>
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Stocks slept. David Tepper might buy the Panthers. Bitcoin faces the dreaded Death Cross.
U. S. prescription-drug prices are outrageous. This is so obvious it offers rare common ground for people on both sides of the political divide. One of President Donald Trump\u2019s most effective 2016 pitches was his pledge to do something about it.
But the plan Trump announced today avoided big moves and tough decisions, Max Nisen writes. For example, he could have fulfilled a campaign pledge to have the government negotiate prices on behalf of patients. Instead, his plan proposes modest tweaks to Medicare Part D. That\u2019s better than nothing, but a missed opportunity for bigger savings.
Other proposals similarly nibble at the problem. None match the tough rhetoric Trump aimed at everyone from drugmakers to \u201cmiddle men\u201d and foreigners who don\u2019t have to pay exorbitant prices for American-made drugs.
Here\u2019s the stock-price action of one \u201cmiddle man,\u201d Express Scripts Holding Co., a pharmacy benefit manager:
That price collapse marks when Trump started complaining about \u201cmiddle men\u201d in his speech today. The recovery marks when Trump stopped talking and investors realized nothing truly awful was going to happen to them. Shares of other PBMs and drugmakers also finished the day higher.
Joe Nocera argues there\u2019s already a great drug-price-slashing tool lying around, if anybody wants to sharpen it and start swinging: the 34-year-old Hatch-Waxman Act. This law set time limits on patent protections and encouraged new generic drugs. It worked for about 20 years, Joe says. But then, naturally, companies learned to get around it, with \u201c patent fortresses \u201d and other shenanigans. Joe suggests some simple updates to the law could solve many problems.
Austin Frakt proposes having the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review analyze new drugs to figure out their true value. That would be a guideline for drugmakers and payers to agree on a semi-reasonable price.
These are all great ideas! They weren\u2019t in the president\u2019s plan.
Malaysians just overcame massive \u201cgerrymandering, nativist appeals, a muzzled press and concerted efforts to depress the vote\u201d to throw out their country\u2019s ruling coalition for the first time in 60 years. It\u2019s time to restore the country\u2019s institutions and give voters the real change they obviously want, Bloomberg\u2019s editors write.
Iraq holds parliamentary elections this weekend. But their outcome won\u2019t be decided until much later, thanks to the huge mess U. S. and Iranian meddling made of Iraq\u2019s political system, warns Hussein Ibish .
Messing with Iraq has been a rare area of agreement for the U. S. and Iran for the past 65 years. For most of that time, the U. S. has been either messing with Iran or dealing with the blowback, writes Pankaj Mishra . Trump\u2019s nuclear-deal gambit is just the latest episode.
Joe Nocera takes a deep dive into one man\u2019s nightmarish experience working with a Russian company:
\u201cThe story I\u2019m about to tell is one of those tales that make you wonder why anybody does business in Russia. It\u2019s a country that really doesn\u2019t play by anybody\u2019s rules but its own.\u201d
Democrats don\u2019t want to think about the dark side of Watergate\u2019s legacy, but they must, warns Sam Tanenhaus. History may see Richard Nixon\u2019s defenestration as a triumph of the rule of law, but many conservatives never stopped stewing about it, considering it an undemocratic negation of a landslide election. Many won\u2019t let Trump suffer the same fate so easily.
Banks have been cutting their rainy-day funds because obviously it will never rain again, Stephen Gandel writes.
We need a better, scarier, more descriptive term for anthropogenic climate change than \u201canthropogenic climate change.\u201d \u2013 Faye Flam
If you want gun makers to change their ways, then you could a) buy a bunch of shares in them and try to use your miniscule new leverage to force them to change. Or you could b) take the Occam\u2019s Razor approach and not do that \u2013 Matt Levine (sign up for Matt\u2019s newsletter here)
The first step to better investing is admitting what you don\u2019t know. \u2013 Barry Ritholtz (sign up for Barry\u2019s newsletter here)
It\u2019s been two years. Maybe it\u2019s time for the UK to figure out what \u201cBrexit\u201d really means? \u2013 Therese Raphael
Who\u2019s been right on China so far? Not Maoists, not Western liberals. It\u2019s Karl Marx. \u2013 Tyler Cowen
Space needs a traffic cop. American baby names have a lot of vowels lately. In Bolivia\u2019s navy, you can sail zero seas.
Corrections: Yesterday\u2019s letter misspelled \u201cinvitations\u201d and forgot the link to Justin Fox\u2019s story on lumber tariffs .
Note: Please send drugs, suggestions and kicker ideas to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the author of this story: Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Timothy L. O’Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.net<\/p>\n

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