Guest Opinion: How our government abetted the baby formula shortage

Recent news has featured urgent, dumbfounding stories about a shortage of baby formula — another example of the menacing “empty-shelf syndrome” at the nation’s supermarkets.

Explaining shelves without baby formula is a complicated story.

We know this much: it has only been under the explosive pressure created by news reporting and images of empty shelves that the government and its agencies have reacted, while disclaiming responsibility for their own regulatory policies that provided the gun and the ammunition for shooting ourselves in the foot.

This is a short-term crisis. Key elected officials and bureaucrats, who bumbled their way through business as usual until the story erupted, are now scrambling to make the shortage yesterday’s forgotten problem. After all, there’s a mid-term election less than six months away, and shelves empty of the sustenance needed by babies are not merely unfortunate “optics,” but terrible, horrible, no good, very bad optics for any administration.

But there’s a larger story here. This shortage is only one specimen among countless others that could be cited as proof of the quip by the Nobel Prize-winning, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Here are a few of the ways in which our federal and state governments have abetted our predicament.

1.) A prolonged — and possibly unnecessary — shutdown sustained by the Food and Drug Administration of an entire Abbott Laboratories production plant in Sturgis, Michigan, crippled the national supply of formula. Abbott produces about 40% of the nation’s supply. While not all of Abbott’s formula comes from the Sturgis plant, the sluggishness in resolving the issues there even as the shortage developed is an indictment of the FDA, the agency positioned to hustle that plant back into production.

2.) Tariff and regulatory policies have indiscriminately reduced imports of baby formula from foreign sources.

3.) Regulations built into federal and state programs have tended over the years to destroy competition in the making of baby formula and reduce sources of domestic supply. The federal government’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) now furnishes baby formula for over 50% of the nation’s developing infants. But the contracting process features sole-supplier arrangements and hefty rebates paid by those suppliers to state governments. These arrangements stunt the growth of competition, favor consolidation among the few producers able to afford the rebates, and invite corruption of public officials. NOTE: When contracting processes are not fully transparent, the ability of “rebates” to mutate into “kickbacks” should never be underestimated. In fact, it would be hard to overestimate the cost of this legalized rebate/kickback peculiarity to the public and the nation’s healthcare system. That cost is likely in the incalculable billions; and its role in creating shortages of hundreds of medicines and other crucial supplies is scarcely understood by dozing lawmakers.

On May 13, a Wall Street Journal editorial proposed the removal of certain tariffs that depress the importing of baby formula from friendly foreign sources as a step in the right direction. That approach, a partial and short-term fix, has some bipartisan support in Congress.

The explosion of mortifying news about the shortage has whipped the FDA into straightening out the issues with the Abbott Laboratories plant in Sturgis, Michigan.

Some in Congress, demonstrating again that they don’t want to work too hard at figuring things out, have proposed simply dumping wheelbarrows full of money into the FDA’s budget — the very FDA that dithered while the Sturgis plant remained closed and the shortage deepened.

However, four mothers in Congress have introduced a superior bill to increase the supply of baby formula rapidly, bring competition and transparency to this industry, and hold the FDA accountable.

Dear reader and voter, this is your government, the maker of policies, laws and regulations that are at cross-purposes and do not serve the wider public interest.

The only way your elected representatives can be spurred to do what’s needed is for an incensed electorate to yell loudly enough to drown out the lobbyists and industry associations, and to drive your government to abandon regulatory folly so that a marketplace — more free and competitive — can do what only it is best equipped to do.

Please raise your voice with mine to administer a sharp spur and stinging whip to the flank of the United States Congress.

Marion Mass, M.D.; Bucks County pediatrician; co-founder, Practicing Physicians of America. Member of this paper’s editorial board.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Guest Opinion: How our government abetted the baby formula shortage