From the article:
> Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, admits that a free—“uncontrolled”—market would bring down prices. Yet, his solution is more government control, specifically price controls.
> What does history teach us about price controls?
> The U.S.S.R., Cuba, Korea, Spain, and Venezuela amongst others have all used strict government price controls. The results were: shortages of everything, viz., long lines of Russians standing in the snow waiting for government-issued shoes or toilet paper; poor worker productivity; very low standards of living; and no innovation. This is precisely what we don’t want.
From the study:
> The most realistic short-term strategies to address high prices include enforcing more stringent requirements for the award and extension of exclusivity rights; enhancing competition by ensuring timely generic drug availability; providing greater opportunities for meaningful price negotiation by governmental payers; generating more evidence about comparative cost-effectiveness of therapeutic alternatives; and more effectively educating patients, prescribers, payers, and policy makers about these choices.
That article is libertarian trash, and contradicts the study.
Deregulating food - and much worse - drugs, would just end up in dangerous cheap products, and slightly less dangerous but still low quality products. Every company optimizing for profit will take every shortcut available to them. Deregulating opens up a lot of them. Most of them detrimental to consumers, few of them detrimental enough to warrant a decrease in public image.