Eye on Albany: Hiking Prescription Costs
The Empire Center’s Bill Hammond sounds the alarm on a Hochul administration proposal to mandate “a $10.18 ‘dispensing fee’ for almost every prescription filled in New York, a change that would add billions of dollars to health-care costs statewide.” This and other rules targeting pharmacy benefit managers “would add $7 to $10 to the bottom-line cost of each prescription” — new costs that will “likely reach into the billions.” The state’s draft regulations “seem primarily focused on maximizing consumers’ choice of pharmacies — and individual pharmacies’ access to customers — rather than saving money.” Before moving ahead, Department of Financial Services chief Adrienne Harris “should explain how tacking a $10.18 fee on every prescription would not drive those prices even higher.”
From the right: Iran’s Already at War With US
“The greatest obstacle to peace in the Middle East” is Iran, charges The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. “So far 30 Americans have died in this latest conflict with [Iran-backed] Hamas. But Iran has been killing Americans for decades” — and getting away with it by relying on “proxies to do the dirty work.” E.g.: The Pentagon blames Tehran for the deaths of 603 US soldiers during the Iraq war. And while “the sense” now is that the Gaza conflict is an “Israeli” matter, it’ll “quickly become an American war if Hamas executes” US hostages. President Biden remains “reluctant to speak of Iran,” but we’ll “never have peace so long as Iran continues to escape repercussions for its murderous actions” by hiding behind proxies.
Conservative: Joe’s Silence on Tehran’s Evil
In President Biden’s “zeal to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Barack Obama’s farcical nuclear deal with Iran, he handed power to that authoritarian regime,” grumbles Elizabeth Stauffer at the Washington Examiner. “And on Oct. 7, we saw them flex their muscles in the most depraved display of evil in modern memory” when Hamas, which “receives 93% of its funding from Iran,” launched its terror attack on Israel. “Biden strongly condemned the Hamas massacre,” yet “conspicuously missing from his remarks was any mention of Iran’s complicity.” His “ unwillingness to acknowledge the truth about Iran, the enemy he and his administration have coddled and enriched in their pursuit of a nuclear deal that the regime will never honor, renders him unfit to serve as commander in chief.”
Campus beat: Lefty Muslim-Brotherhood Dupes
“It’s easy to point fingers at the students” who “scream genocidal slogans and intimidate” Jews, but “who is influencing them?” asks Eitan Fischberger at City Journal. It follows “a long process of indoctrination — and educators linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are at its onset.” Students for Justice in Palestine was founded by Berkely prof Hatem Bazian, allegedly in his youth a close Brotherhood affiliate. He “grasped that open identification with the Brotherhood prevented large-scale recruitment” and marketed “SJP as an ostensibly progressive organization.” But he’s “just one example of a much larger phenomenon of Brotherhood-linked academics.” Another “is Columbia University’s Joseph Massad,” who praised “the Hamas massacre as ‘awesome.’ ” This “rise of radicalization on campuses is an alarm bell for America.”
China watch: Bridge & Road Robbery
As Xi Jinping celebrates the 10th anniversary of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Elaine Dezenski at Euro News flags how “broken promises, cracked dams, and wrecked state treasuries” have replaced “optimism and ambition” for the nations that “took a chance on Xi’s signature infrastructure and investment program.” It’s meant “bankruptcy and default” for “Zambia and Sri Lanka,” and crippling debt for “Argentina, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malaysia, Montenegro, Pakistan, and Tanzania.” It’s left Ecuador with a $2.6 billion “hydroelectric dam built at the foot of an active volcano has 17,000 cracks in its structure that force it to operate at limited power and risk failure or collapse. Dams in Uganda and Pakistan have structural cracks as well.” Add “Chinese-fueled corruption,” e.g. “Officials in Ecuador received $76 m in bribes related to the dam with thousands of cracks.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
