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posted by martyb on Friday August 09 2019, @10:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the Good-news-for-cross-border-insulin-shoppers dept.

If you're into going to Canada for lower drug prices, things should get even better after the middle of next year. Canada is going to be changing the way it calculates the price of medication, which will lower costs. Canada can do this because, unlike the USA, Canadian regulators are allowed to determine when a patent monopoly is being abused and act accordingly.

Canada Promises to Save Billions with Tweaks to Patent Drug System:

Canadians can expect to pay less for prescription drugs as early as next summer

The federal government is making changes to the way it will evaluate new drug prices, a tweak it says will save Canadians billions over the next 10 years.

On Friday, the government released changes to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, first set up in 1987 as a shield against what the government calls "excessive prices," set to come into force next July.

"The [board] relies on outdated regulatory tools and information that foreign medicine pricing authorities updated years ago. As a result, list prices for patented medicines in Canada are now among the highest in the world," notes a release from Health Canada.

Under the new regulations, the board will no longer compare prices with the United States and Switzerland, which have some of the world's highest drug prices, when figuring out what companies are allowed to charge. It will still compare drug prices to France, Germany and Italy, and has added Japan, Spain, Norway, Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands to the list.

The board will also now have to consider a drug's "value to and financial impact on consumers in the health system" when determining if a price is excessive.

"These bold reforms will both make prescription drugs more affordable and accessible for all Canadians saving them an estimated $13 billion in the next decade and lay the foundation for national pharmacare," the federal health agency said in a statement.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by deimtee on Saturday August 10 2019, @04:44AM (3 children)

    by deimtee (3272) on Saturday August 10 2019, @04:44AM (#878115) Journal

    Maybe they will have to stop spending twice as much on advertising as they do on research.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:54AM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:54AM (#878177) Homepage Journal

    That would be nice, yes. I certainly don't want anyone telling my customers "ask your coder about our TLS library". It'd be right fucking annoying and I'd refuse to use it out of spite.

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    • (Score: 2) by juggs on Saturday August 10 2019, @04:43PM

      by juggs (63) on Saturday August 10 2019, @04:43PM (#878327) Journal

      So you think the person best placed to choose which medicine to take is the customer i.e. the end user / the patient?

      What exactly are they basing that decision on? Probably advertising feel good force fed to them and some partial at best medical advice websites they found online. Websites funded by who and to what end? You can be sure the majority of Jo Schmo users visiting those sites won't research the structure or funding of those sites, even if such information is discoverable.

      This goes hand in hand with the customer / end user / patient self diagnosing their issues based on the exact same sources of information with perhaps a bit of word of mouth from people they know.

      It's really not a good situation as people tend to "google" their symptoms - which in most instances will bring up a whole raft of possible ailments that could produce those symptoms. Which one they go on to decide is afflicting them is going to be based on the influences identified above. Then they go see their MD and insist on medicine X be prescribed.

      Ideally you'd visit medical professionals to obtain an actual definitive diagnosis. Then discuss the most effective course of treatment with them. This of course relies on said medical professionals being completely objective and unswayed by the vast finances swirling around their industry thanks to the big pharma companies. I'm sure some are.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by barbara hudson on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:48PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:48PM (#878228) Journal
    Twice as much??? It was 4x as much in the 80s, and it's gotten a lot worse since. TV ads, lobbyists, payments to doctors for meeting goals for number of prescriptions written, rebates (really kickbacks) to pharmacies, companies like Walmart (who got nailed for asking for illegal rebates here), paid trips to attend conferences in holiday locations, etc. Probably more like 10x, since they're selling drugs at 10x the cost of other countries where they still make a profit that is regulated to between 8% and 11%.
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