Chris Beggy pointed out:
>Two months ago, a frontpage Wall Street Journal article announced that
>the drug companies had capitulated in their long-standing
>campaign to prevent Medicare from covering the cost of prescription
>drugs. The article implied that sometime in the future, the
>government would eventually have the power to dictate their prices.
This would seem to explain the downturn that Beth has inquired about. It also seems that a capitalist economy left to itself cannot reproduce labor power via the wage, direct and social. The drugs that capitalists find profitable to sell at the prices they set are out of reach of too many waged workers, exposing the proletariat to workless sickness. The state is forced to dictate prices to a capitalist industry upon which the health of the working class depends if the system is not to damage its own golden geese. In dictating the prices (and perhaps indirectly quantitites produced) of certain drugs, the state then assumes the role of an ideal collective capitalist, ensuring that no one industry interferes with the reproduction of labor power upon which the system as a whole depends. The grave problem for capital here is its own inability to provide its own most basic general precondition--the health of the working class--in terms of its own (value form) logic. By having to allow non market criteria to determine the prices of certain goods, capital then finds itself in an insoluble ideological dilemma. I have been stimulated here by Bob Jessop's discussion in his State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place.
yours, rakesh