The US Government neglects a once-great industrial sector--pharma. Where exactly, are the jobs we need going to come from? To say nothing of the cures?

The Export-Import Bank of the United States is holding a conference in Washington DC this week, and what's notable about the agenda is the absence of any representation of the pharma/medical device sectors on the list of speakers.   One would surmise, therefore, that the medical sector just isn't that important to export-minded economic planners.   Instead the speakers are heavy with diplomats, reps from tech companies, from construction companies--and, of course, well-connected DC-based lobbyists.

Indeed, it's easy to see why the pharma sector was overlooked.  In 2009, according to the International Trade Administration's Office of Health and Consumer Goods, pharmaceutical exports from the US were about $46 billion, and imports were $82.5 billion; thus the US has a negative pharma trade balance of $35.5 billion.   Not so long ago, the US pharma sector was a huge net exporter, but decades of political attacks on the pharma industry, combined with restrictive legislation, have taken their toll.  This decline in US pharma competitiveness is measurable and quantifiable, as Michael Milken noted recently.

We should worry about the decline of any US industry, of course, but surely we should worry in particular about the decline of the medical industry, for the simple reason that medicine is a key variable as to whether or not we keep our health  Admittedly, the rest of the world is making medicine, but overseas firms are making mostly generics--copies of extant medicines.  In other words, the rest of the world is mostly not innovating, it is instead free-riding, and so that's why we are suffering a Serious Medicine Crash.   In the long run, we will have to find a way to recapitalize the medical sector, and we probably will, because demand for medicine is always strong.  That renascent pharma sector just might not be in the US, that's all.

In the words of Serious Medicine strategist Jeremy Shane:

One of the fastest ways to reduce costs for American consumers and increase use of American technology would be to export the fruits of our drug research and diagnostics.  The larger the population to which new drugs or genetic or diagnostic tests are distributed, the faster we will learn which drugs work best for which groups of people, and the greater the opportunity for US-based innovators to realize value from great science and US based manufacturing of new therapies.

But none of these economic opportunities seem to be of interest to the Obama administration.  Having enacted a new healthcare finance scheme at enormous fiscal and political cost, the Obamans don't seem interested in revisiting any facet of the healthcare issue.  Indeed, to the extent that the the drying up of the drug pipeline means that government agencies spend less on healthcare--no matter what the longterm consequence to public health--the Obamans might even be happy to see the medical sector wither away.   That's speculative, of course, but we know from the Ex-Im speakers' roster that nobody in Washington is doing anything to change the faltering status quo.