Logical Reasoning

PT148 · S3 · Q17 The government health service

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The government health service has said that it definitely will not pay for patients to take the influenza medicine Antinfia until the drug's manufacturer, PharmCo, provides detailed information about Antinfia's cost-effectiveness.

Statements

Govt: We definitely won't pay for patients to take the flu medicine Antinfia until PharmCo provides detailed info about its cost-effectiveness.

PharmCo: We'd have to do massive clinical trials to obtain that detailed info, and doing massive clinical trials requires that the drug is in widespread circulation, which only happens if the government health service pays for Antinfia.

Evaluate

The question stem reads a little atypically, but it has the same function as a normal Most Supported stem: assuming everything in this paragraph is true, what can we best derive?

Both the government and PharmCo are saying things with very absolute language. So we could potentially represent their ideas conditionally.

Government don't have detailed info → won't pay for Antinfia about cost-effectiveness

PharmCo Detailed → massive → drug is → govt pays for info clinical in wide Antinfia trials circulation

Since PharmCo's statements involved listing requirements (require / cannot be until / only if), we're chaining these together by remembering that A → B can be read as "A requires B".

The info the govt wants requires clinical trials, which requires wide circulation, which requires the government paying for the drug.

If we synthesize this chain and just go head to tail, then we see that PharmCo is saying, "Detailed info requires govt pays for Antinfia".

By contrapositive, they're saying, .

And the government said,

Basically, we're at a stalemate. It's like trying to exchange ransom for a hostage. .

Goal

Let's look for an answer expressing this stalemate.

17.

If the statements of both the government health service and PharmCo are true, which one of the following is most likely to also be true?

The government health service never
Too Strong
Too Strong: never / any /unless One-Claim Support All we know is that the government won't pay for Antinfia until they see info about its cost-effectiveness. We have no justification for assuming this is the government's policy for 100% of medicines. We should also feel "dirty" picking an answer like this, because we know that the correct answers on Most Supported / Must Be True always involve combining information from multiple claims. But this answer just sounds like the first sentence on steroids. It has nothing to do with assessing the interaction of the government's statement with PharmCo's.
9% picked this
Correct
Antinfia will never be in
Why this is right
"Never" seems strong, but that is the nature of this stalemate. If we had a hostage / ransom situation where the cops wouldn't send over the money until they had the hostage, and the kidnapper wouldn't send over the hostage until he had the money, then the situation would never resolve. Similarly, if the government won't pay for Antinfia until they get detailed info, and PharmCo can't get detailed info unless the government pays for Antinfia, then we know that we're stuck there. Neither side can get what it needs to proceed, so ... There will never be detailed info from PharmCo. The government will never pay for Antinfia. This answer is talking about widespread circulation, though. What were we told in regards to that? It said that "the drug can be in widespread circulation only if the government pays for it". So since we know that the government will never pay for Antinfia, we know that the drug will never be in widespread circulation.
Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
78% picked this
If the government health service
Out of Scope: patients pay
It would be total speculation to guess what patients will do, because we didn't receive any information at all about patients.
6% picked this
The government health service should
Out of Scope: should
We can very rarely derive "should" ideas from information that is just factual and descriptive. These two sides are at a crossroads. Both of them need something from the other side in order to proceed. The government doesn't want to pay for a drug until it gets detailed info about the drug's cost effectiveness (that's a reasonable thing for a government to want). Why would we arbitrarily say that PharmCo is in the right, and that the government should capitulate to their demands?
2% picked this
Antinfia is not cost-effective.
Explicitly Unknown
No one knows whether Antinfia is cost-effective. We would need massive clinical trials for that, which haven't been conducted yet.
4% picked this

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