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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 18, 2019)
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2019 Baker City, Oregon 4A Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com OUR VIEW Starting discussion about vaping State Rep. Cheri Helt, R-Bend, plans to introduce a measure in the 2020 legislative session that would ban the sale of fl avored e-cigarette or other vaping products. The bill should spark badly needed debate on the topic. Vaping does have its problems. According to the Centers for Disease Control, it’s increasingly popu- lar among high school and middle school students, so much so that more than 10% of middle school students and 27.5% of high schoolers reported using vaping products in the last 30 days. At the same time, however, cigarette smoking in that same age group has declined dramatically, the CDC says. That said, not everyone agrees that banning even the sweetest vaping products is a great idea. A recent article in Science magazine noted that vap- ing has moved people away from traditional tobacco products, which pose more health risks than vaping products do. Opting to reduce harm rather than eliminate it is considered by some to be a better ap- proach to such problems. Here’s another piece to add to the puzzle: Accord- ing to the CDC’s 2019 National Youth Tobacco Sur- vey, a big majority of teens who had ever tried vap- ing, some 55.3 %, did so out of curiosity, not because candy- or fruit-fl avored products were available. Only 22.4 % said they fi rst tried vaping because of the fl avors available. None of this means vaping is good for kids, of course. But, the Science magazine researchers say, the best way to approach the problem is by taxing vaping products heavily enough to discourage teens’ use of them, by tracking their sales closely and by restricting the sale of nicotine in any form to those 21 or older, something Oregon already does. Scientists agree that nicotine is not good for anyone, adult or child. It raises blood pressure, can increase risk of heart attacks and it is highly addic- tive. Oregonians will have to decide how they want to approach the problem of keeping it out of the lungs of kids, and Helt’s bill can be a good starting point for the discussion. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald. OTHER VIEWS House takes much-needed step toward dealing with drug prices Editorial from The Los Angeles Times: Although lawmakers and President Trump have talked a good game about bringing down prescription drug prices, they’ve managed to take few, if any, steps toward that goal. Trump’s most dramatic proposals — tying the price of certain Medicare drugs to their prices overseas and barring payments from drug manu- facturers to middlemen — have either been dropped or held up by internal bickering. And a Senate committee’s pro- posal to rein in drug price hikes, which garnered a rare degree of bipartisan sup- port, has been stalled by opposition from Republican senators. Yet lawmakers haven’t given up, as demonstrated Thursday when the House passed HR 3, a bill that would empower Medicare to negotiate the price of up to 250 prescription drugs per year while also guarding consumers with employer- provided health benefi ts against sharp increases in drug costs. Although the bill may be too ambitious for the Senate and the president to swallow, its passage in the House injects some badly needed momentum into the drive to rein in spending on prescription medications. Drug manufacturers often argue that their prices aren’t the big issue for consumers, given that prescription drugs have steadily accounted for only about 10% of U.S. health care spending. But the costs of brand-name and specialty drugs have been escalating far faster than infl ation, a problem that is only partially offset by the declining prices of many generic medications. As a consequence of high costs, millions of Americans are unable to afford the medicines they need; according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, almost 30% of U.S. consumers didn’t fi ll a prescription, skipped doses or took an over-the-counter medication instead in the past 12 months. Cutting drugmakers’ prices comes with a tradeoff, however. Bringing a new drug to market is an extremely expen- sive proposition, requiring manufactur- ers and their investors to put a signifi - cant amount of money at risk. Any move to restrain prices inevitably reduces their incentive to invest in drug research and development. That means some break- through drugs may not be developed, or may be pushed further back in the pipeline. But there’s no telling which new drugs would be forgone; indeed, no matter how prices are regulated, the incentives for continuing to invest in potential block- buster cures for widespread or costly diseases would remain strong. And the current system seems unsustainable, as new drugs are popping up at mind- boggling prices of $1 million or more for a course of treatment. Even some drug- makers agree that we need to switch to a system that prices drugs not accord- ing to how much the market will bear but according to their value — that is, how much they improve the lives of the people who take them. But that’s a dif- fi cult and politically sensitive calculation because it may require putting a value on human life and the quality thereof. The House proposal moves toward value-based pricing, but only gingerly. For the 50 to 250 medications that face no competition and account for the larg- est cost to Medicare, the government would bargain with manufacturers over prices, considering such factors as research and production costs, prior fed- eral aid in the development of that drug, and how much of a therapeutic advance it represents over alternative treat- ments. Most important, the bill would cap the price Medicare pays for those drugs at 120% of the average charged in Canada, Australia, Japan and three European nations — effectively relying on those countries’ calculations of the drugs’ value. The six countries pay signifi cantly less than we do for medications, so in the short term, the bill would result in huge savings for Medicare. And because Medi- care is so large, with almost 60 million enrollees, changes in the program tend to ripple through the rest of the market. Over the long term, though, manufactur- ers would have an incentive to demand higher prices in those six countries, leading to lower savings here. Neverthe- less, such rebalancing would be welcome because it would force foreign consumers to pick up a more fair share of the tab for developing new drugs. Meanwhile, the bill would use most of the money Medicare saves on prescrip- tion drugs to fund new dental, hearing and vision coverage at no extra cost to Medicare Part B enrollees. It’s true that many senior citizens already purchase this coverage through Medicare Advan- tage or supplemental insurance plans. But moving those important benefi ts into Medicare itself would vastly improve older consumers’ access to them. Only two Republicans in the House voted for HR 3, largely because of their concern about the price caps. But as shown by proposals from the White House and the Senate’s health com- mittee, there is a consensus emerging around the need to reduce drug costs and tie prices to value. Lawmakers just need to fi nd a way to turn that consensus into tangible progress. Why I think the Herald is worth paying for I think the Baker City Herald is a bargain. But I also believe that this newspaper and the information it gathers and reports, much of which is not available anywhere else, is too valuable to give away. The Herald, which will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2020, has never been free. And although I wasn’t around for most of that considerable span, I feel confi dent in saying that readers over those many generations have recognized that a credible newspaper, in common with other products and services in the marketplace, comes with a price tag. We publish about 155 issues every year, and we’ll deliver every one of those to customers in town for $10.80 per month (mail subscrip- tions are $12.50). Copies are also available at dozens of places around the city for $1.50 each. The advent of the Internet, of course, has had dramatic effects on newspapers and, indeed, on all JAYSON JACOBY forms of media. A newspaper can hardly claim to be current if it lacks a website and a social media presence, and the Herald’s website — www.baker- cityherald.com — has been around since 2001. We’ve been on Facebook since 2010. Until late this summer our web- site was a compromise of sorts. It was free to all, but the content was limited. The advertisements printed in the paper weren’t available, and some of the news stories were abbreviated versions of what was printed in ink. The situation changed in Septem- ber when, under the ownership of the EO Media Group, we launched a new website. This site is much more comprehensive — more stories, and the full rather than edited versions. But the site was still free. We never intended this to be permanent, and for the same reason that grocery stores don’t let you fi ll a shopping cart and roll it out without paying, and restaurants don’t serve free meals. Those businesses have to spend money to buy products, and they have to pay employees to stock their shelves and prepare the food. They could hardly stay open if they didn’t charge customers. Newspapers are no different. It takes time — which is to say, money — for us to assemble those 155 annual issues. We attend public meetings to keep track of how government agencies are spending your tax dollars. We interview and photograph your friends, relatives and neighbors to fi nd out what’s happening in their lives, and in our community. We go to sporting events and schools and other venues to chronicle the achievements, in the classroom and on the fi eld and the court, of the young students and athletes who make us proud. We also provide space to busi- nesses which pay us to advertise their wares. That the Herald’s website is no longer free refl ects not only the signifi cant increase in the amount of content available there, but also the respect we have for our subscribers. We can’t very well expect them to pay for the news we gather when other people are getting the same information for free. Since the change to the web- site we’ve received a handful of complaints, most of these com- ments posted on our Facebook page, where we often post links to stories on the website. Facebook, of course, is free. But we’re using social media in the same way that other busi- nesses do — to alert our customers to new content that’s available to them as subscribers. That content is not limited to digital versions of news articles, editorials and columns, either. Subscribers also have access to what we call our “e-edition” or “replica edition.” This version includes pdfs of every page in the paper, complete with advertising. The Baker City Herald probably wouldn’t have survived for a year, much less for a century and a half, without the constant support of readers who recognize the value of the information we provide and are willing to pay a very modest sum for it. I think we are obliged to reward that loyalty by adjusting to changes in technology and making sure that our subscribers can get local news where, when and in what form, is most convenient for them. Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.
