MEGAN MCARDLE: Me-Too Drugs: Herd Animals, Not Copycats. “I’ve never really understood the objections to ‘me-too’ drugs. Somehow, the topic of health care makes otherwise sensible people forget everything they ever knew about economics and start spouting Victorian-era Socialist rhetoric about wasteful competition and superfluous duplication. These same people would think you were crazy if you started ranting about how many societal resources are wasted by having three kinds of unsalted butter available in the supermarket. And yet, this is the same argument.”
I had some related thoughts here.