Maybe allow competition?

The Initiative's Insights newsletter generally concludes with a more light-hearted column.

The case that our Michael Johnston took on in it this week lent itself to lots of different approaches. 

This was my take on the same topic - but from a different angle. Because I tend to think about things in terms of statutory barriers to entry. And Jennifer Roback Morse lives in my head. 

Imagine that you lived in a small town with one pharmacy. The next town is a long drive away.

And the town’s pharmacist is the most culturally insensitive, if not outright racist, person you’ve ever met.

Friends avoid going there to avoid being ridiculed for their health conditions.

You’ve had enough. You know that the town would be better off with another pharmacy. So you decide to open one.

You buy a shop right across the street from your soon-to-be competitor.

You’ll hit your first roadblock pretty quickly.

You aren’t a pharmacist. You’d obviously planned on hiring a pharmacist, but you were going to own and control the business.

The pharmacist cartel has ensured that nobody except for pharmacists can compete with other pharmacists. It’s in the Medicines Act. And it helps protect the shop across the street.

Because you care about your community and because you refuse to give up at the first bureaucratic impediment, you find a solution.

Instead of hiring a pharmacist, you partner with one. You loan that pharmacist a lot of money to buy into the business. Your partner gets 51% ownership and effective control of the pharmacy’s operations. You get 49%, interest payments on that loan, and the joyful anticipation of driving the other guy out of business by providing your town with better service.

But then you hit your second hurdle.

You need a license to dispense funded prescription medicines. That licence comes from the government. And the government prioritises applications for licenses in places that are underserved.

Your town is small. It can’t sustain two pharmacies. Your plan is to drive the racist across the street out of business by providing a better and more inclusive service.

But your application to dispense funded medicines goes to the bottom of the pile. Because the town that can sustain one pharmacy already has one.

The Pharmacy Councill this week announced that all pharmacists will be required to undertake ongoing cultural competence training and activity.

Their guidelines are as cringe-inducing as you might expect. And I doubt that cultural competence training does much to help a racist to achieve enlightenment.

I wish instead that it were legally simple for new pharmacies to drive culturally incompetent ones out of business.

It would be more effective.

But I doubt the pharmacists’ cartel would like it.