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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"The [board] relies on outdated regulatory tools and information that foreign medicine pricing authorities updated years ago.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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @03:23PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @03:23PM (#878278)

    I used to do preclinical research. I assure you that if someone like me was in charge it would become at least 4x more efficient.

    Standards are extremely low among medical researchers. Even the most basic results can only be repeated like 25% of the time... when someone even tries. They come up with excuses ("it isn't novel") not to repeat each others work. If we had higher research standards the entire amyloid-beta alzhiemer's fiasco would have been avoided, the "cancer is many diseases" excuse would not be in play, etc.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 12 2019, @01:59PM

    I don't at all disagree. Bean counters and lawyers make lousy scientists. Your second paragraph may be more thorough but it's the dead opposite of efficient though. More work means more man-hours, which means more cost. It may mean savings over the long term but that would need to be proven before it could be claimed.

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