|
I'm not that taken by media content rules either, but the PBS is another thing - surely its an example of successful monopsony. Its true that if every country had a PBS then there would be problems of insufficient incentives for investment in pharmaceutical development, but Australia is a very small market by global standards so the PBS means that we get the savings without any significant loss of product range. The counterpoint is that the subsidised nature of drugs on the PBS probably leads to overconsumption by Australian consumers - not a good thing - but it is important to distinguish the monopsony purchasing arrangements from the consumer subsidies, because we should be able to design a separable system if we wanted to junk the subsidies.
| 
