If your prescription drug costs too much, you buy it anyway, or risk your health and maybe even your life by going without.

In the case of cars and computers, the option to walk away not only saves the individual consumer some money, it is a crucial part of what makes the marketplace work. If enough people do the same, it sends a signal up the line to the people who make cars and computers that they had better lower the price of their products if they want to sell any.

In the case of prescription drugs, walking away is not an option. So, whether you pay the cost yourself or have the help of private insurance or government support, the feedback loop that is supposed to regulate the free market better than any government action generally doesn't exist.

An attempt to restore that important balance has been undertaken by many private insurance providers and more than half the states. Beginning soon, Utah will be among them. And not a moment too soon.

The Utah Health Department is compiling a preferred-drug list, a roster of medicines it believes to be low-cost yet effective, which the state's Medicaid program will pay for with no questions asked. Other medications will still be available to Medicaid patients, but prescribing physicians will be expected to justify the departure from the list.

That, plus a planned multistate bulk-buying scheme, should save as much as $14 million out of the program's $1.4 billion budget. As the practice of medicine increasingly becomes a decision about which pill to take, and as the cost of medications continues to go up at double the general inflation rate, something must be done to make medicines more affordable.

House Speaker Greg Curtis, among others, has been heard to wonder about whether the red tape and possible litigation associated with such a program will really end up saving all that much money. Those are questions that are not necessarily made any less valid by the fact that Curtis was among many Utah lawmakers who benefited from campaign donations from the pharmaceutical industry.

Oversight of the program - by doctors, advocates for the poor, the governor's office and the Legislature - is crucial. But the point of the oversight must be to make sure that patients get what they need, not to see that drug makers get what they want.