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This is a great post, and a great question. But maybe an unanswerable question.
Maybe the real issue is that we should get back to more regulation of Big Pharma overall - stop the peddling to consumer, stop the bribing of doctors, stop the hiding of bad results, stop insane over-pricing.
One thing we could do is change the laws that prohibit importation of drugs from other countries. If I want to buy a drug in India for personal use why am I breaking "the law"? I'm an adult that can make my own decisions and in my view if a drug is safe for an Indian why isn't it safe for me? What right does our government have telling me I have to pay 10X to 1000 x for the same drug here than I could pay in another market?
Look at the drug Sovaldi, Cost in the U.S. is 1,000 dollars per pill. In India it is 4 dollars. Why is it against the law to mail order these drugs from India? Why is it I can pay .4% of the "cost" in India? If I paid the same discount for the CF drug in the original post it would only be 12.5k per year; I'd have no problem with that.
I have seen! Many! The spouse becomes totally exhausted trying to care for their wife/husband who has little mental capacityleft but were saved from death by multiple medical procedures in the past such as coronary artery stenting, pacemakers, aortic aneurysm repairs, etc.....
I feel so sorry for these spouses. They are literally exhausted and face loss of all their savings!
Surely you have seen or heard of this. If you are married, it could happen to you also.
I heard a stat recently that said that something like 80 percent of medicare patients had surgery within their last 4 months of life and 50 percent within the last week. That's nuts.
I heard a stat recently that said that something like 80 percent of medicare patients had surgery within their last 4 months of life and 50 percent within the last week. That's nuts.
Because our drug companies shell out for new drugs, R&D, drug trials and bring the new drugs to market. We are subsidizing other countries.
That is a myth. R&D for new drugs takes place in many other countries than just the US.
Quote:
This claim that “everyone gets a free ride off us,” pushed so vigorously by pharmaceutical companies to the US public and policy makers, is simply not true.
In fact, other countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom are keen to attract pharmaceutical research and development investments. Prices in these nations are set to enable companies to recover all research and development, manufacturing, marketing, and overhead costs, and to make a reasonable profit.
One reason why Americans pay even more is that our political leaders are richly rewarded by an army of more than 1,000 lobbyists to not set up an independent agency to determine fair prices that reflect the added clinical value for patients: Drug companies champion what they call a “free market,” but they want to disarm the purchasing side of the market before bargaining even starts. We have all witnessed the market pricing spirals that result in burdens for businesses and taxpayers.
One thing we could do is change the laws that prohibit importation of drugs from other countries. If I want to buy a drug in India for personal use why am I breaking "the law"? I'm an adult that can make my own decisions and in my view if a drug is safe for an Indian why isn't it safe for me? What right does our government have telling me I have to pay 10X to 1000 x for the same drug here than I could pay in another market?
Look at the drug Sovaldi, Cost in the U.S. is 1,000 dollars per pill. In India it is 4 dollars. Why is it against the law to mail order these drugs from India? Why is it I can pay .4% of the "cost" in India? If I paid the same discount for the CF drug in the original post it would only be 12.5k per year; I'd have no problem with that.
Drugs are cheap in India because they are only paying manufacturing costs which are peanuts. Americans are paying the cost of R&D as well as manufacturing. We are basically subsidizing cheap drugs in India. If we imported all our drugs from India, US manufacturers would no longer have the US to underwrite all their R&D costs and they would raise the cost of licensing drugs to foreign countries to recoup their money. In other words, we would end up paying a lot more than $4 or whatever. It might not go up to $1000 but it would not be $4.
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