The status quo is the status quo for a reason: Many are satisfied with it; not just corporations and doctors, but many patients. The greatest danger is to oversimplify: Some people have diseases, and need the right pills; other people do not have diseases, and do not need pills; some of the people who seek pills do not need them; some of the people who need pills refuse to seek them. This is not just a matter of everybody getting pills, or everybody stopping them; as HL Mencken said well, For every great problem in life, there is a solution: simple, plausible, and wrong.

In the final part of this series, I will examine proposed solutions to the problem of the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession.

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