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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Canadians are in a kerfuffle over the Trump administration's preliminary plan to allow Americans to import lower-cost prescription medications from Canada.
The plan was announced July 31 and is part of the administration's long-sought effort to drag down the US's skyrocketing drug prices. But it's a long way from being a reality. Even if the plan does pan out, it will likely be years before regulators review, approve, and scale up efforts to import drugs.
Still, Canadians are infuriated by the idea and already brainstorming ways to toss it down the garburator, according to a report by health-news outlet STAT. Many fear that American importation would exacerbate current drug shortages in Canada.
"You are coming as Americans to poach our drug supply, and I don't have any polite words for that," Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa told STAT. Prof. Attaran went on to refer to the plan as "deplorable" and "atrociously unethical." "Our drugs are not for you, period."
[...] On Monday, August 12, Canada's Minister of Health Ginette Petitpas Taylor was set to meet with pharmacists, patients, and industry officials to discuss a response to the US plan, according to STAT. Petitpas Taylor has pledged to "ensure there are no adverse effects to the supply or cost of prescription drugs in Canada."
In order to protect Canadians, some advocates and policy experts suggested that Canada could begin controlling the export of pharmaceuticals, pass new laws simply banning exporting drugs meant for Canadians, or impose new tariffs.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:13AM (39 children)
Supply and demand affect pricing. So if Canada's drug prices are kept low by the government the extra US demand will drive up those prices.
I'm all for lowering drug and healthcare costs in the US. But this is admitting that US drug companies screw the US population and the best we can do is buy drugs from other counties.
How long will it take for US drug companies to increase drug prices due to lower volume caused by US consumers buying directly from Canada? Big Pharma wants its tens of billions in profits and they'll do whatever they can to squeeze it out of the US consumers.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:36AM (12 children)
Was there anybody that did not already know this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:38AM (9 children)
The people thinking free healthcare will magically fix it?
(Score: 5, Informative) by MostCynical on Tuesday August 13 2019, @12:14PM (7 children)
Regulated markets with free/subsidised health care works in several other countries.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2, Disagree) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:08PM (6 children)
I am a crackpot
(Score: 5, Touché) by MostCynical on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:20PM (5 children)
Get sick, get treatment, not be in debt when discharged from hospital?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:32PM (3 children)
But who's rolling in the cash? Hugely flawed system.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday August 13 2019, @09:15PM (2 children)
As opposed to get sick, get treatment, go bankrupt or alternately, get sick, can't afford treatment, die?
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:55PM (1 child)
I guess my sarcasm wasn't loud enough. Allow me to increase it:
That are you talking about? That never happens to executives or anyone else in the investor class.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday August 15 2019, @10:37PM
Yeah, I missed the sarcasm, my detector was taking a break. If that's the worst I do this week, I'll call it a win.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:41PM
"treatment"
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday August 13 2019, @07:31PM
Well done intentionally misrepresenting the entire concept in order to make a strawman argument.
It's not "free" healthcare. It's paid for in taxes. But it's regulated by a central gov't agency that works to prevent the different vendors from taking advantage of a captive market.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 13 2019, @02:20PM
FTFY
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:10PM
Know? No. But I said "admit". And Big Pharma doesn't (and will never) admit that they are screwing the US population.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 13 2019, @12:40PM (2 children)
For the good of American people, let's hope what the Big Pharma can do will be very little.
It still amaze me how far the governance system** of US could go with impunity in betraying their "for the people" mission.
** all the 3 branches together, not only the government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:17PM (1 child)
A significant percentage of prescription drugs get a price hike every year. Big Pharma will just increase the costs more than they had originally planned.
Congress has passed laws preventing Medicare (the largest insurance & healthcare provider in the US) from negotiating lower drug prices (at the behest of Big Pharma, naturally). Every other country with government supplied healthcare negotiates more favorable pricing.
We have not seen the extent of what Big Pharma can do because they never get pushback on their current anti-consumer practices.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 13 2019, @10:00PM
Well, a fool's hope then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:20PM (5 children)
You're missing the reason Cheeto Jesus is doing this in the first place. It's not to get cheaper drugs from Canada. It's to make it impossible for pharmaceutical companies to sell domestically at jacked way the fuck up prices, because there's a cheaper avenue. If they can't sell anything at the inflated prices, they'll lower prices to match or barely beat price+shipping and undercut the price and/or lead time of importing from Canada.
That's the theory anyway. I doubt it will work because the pharmaceutical industry will do whatever it has to to keep it from happening.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:37PM (3 children)
You mean the same drug companies that are selling the exact same drugs in Canada for 10% of the price? Canadian drugs aren't cheaper because they're coming from a different source, they're cheaper because their medical system is able to negotiate a more reasonable price. However, given the choice between lowering their prices 90% in the U.S., or raising them 10x in Canada, what do you suppose they're going to do? Keeping in mind Canada has 1/10th the population, so that the total drug profit for Canada is probably about 1% that of the U.S.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @04:34PM
I quite doubt that Big Pharma wants "their" drugs REALLY start coming from a different source.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:10AM (1 child)
Yes, that's what I mean. Canada requires that they sell them and sell them for those prices and threatens to ignore their patents if they don't. If Americans get to start partaking of that price as well, they lose a fuckton of money. They make some of that back if they sell domestically at the same price because there are no to-Canada-and-back shipping costs.
Or it could be a standard Trump game of chicken to get them to drop their prices a bit. He plays that a hell of a lot if you haven't noticed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:14PM
And? If Canada ignores their patents so someone else starts making them, they lose all of 1% of their combined U.S. + Canada profit. A far better outcome than lowering their prices in the U.S. and losing 90% of that profit. Those drugs still can't be imported into the U.S. since, quite aside from the current broad-spectrum ban on imported drugs, those specific drugs still violate U.S. patents and can't be legally imported.
Of course it would be a very different picture for generics, lifting the blanket ban could totally cut the legs out from under the U.S. makers with their price-gouging collusion. Or maybe not - with the U.S. market on the line U.S. companies might drastically increase their budget for buying Canadian politicians to "fix" their medical system. I think we'd need to lift the ban for far more than just Canada to be sure of avoiding that - let Americans import (FDA-approved) drugs from any major nation with a similarly safe pharmaceutical system and then you really let us benefit from global pricing, rather than just painting a bulls-eye on one particular nearby government to drag them down to our level.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:55AM
You're missing how long things take in this dysfunctional system we have now, even when people are actually trying to get things passed. What he is actually trying to do is look like he is trying to do something about drug prices. If he doesn't get reelected, then this whole thing is a "what could have been" and if he does, then we will probably have at least one enabling law (with all the riders and amendments and whatnot) that needs to be passed. Then there are the years required for the regulations to be promulgated. There is also at least one intervening Congressional election in the meantime. Then there are the inevitable lawsuits that will enjoin the law until it makes its way to SCOTUS. Not to mention that his staff is probably well aware that the Canadians can do all sorts of things to mess with his plan and that the USMCA's patent provision will raise Canadian prices anyway.
Just like any promise from any politician, I'll believe it when I see something beyond just words.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:23PM (16 children)
Econ 101 is an oversimplified view of things.
The extra US demand will mostly drive up drug company output to meet said demand, unless the drug companies are artificially holding supply low - which they should in the case of drugs of abuse which are causing more health problems than they improve - but that's not how things are really done. Pharma output is paced to maximize profits, and this generally means putting as many pills into as many paying customers' hands as possible.
They can make enough Prozac to drug the fish in the lakes downstream from sewage treatment plants, they can make enough Oxy to supply every addict who can get a pill-mill doc to give them a script, if there's profit in it for them, they'll make more.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 13 2019, @02:40PM (15 children)
However no principles of free market economics should apply to this scenario, as there's no elasticity.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:01PM (14 children)
I don't know the whole landscape, but a great many Pharma companies are multi-national. They have no problem charging 10x and more for certain drugs in US and European markets as compared to "developing nations" like India and China. There's a thin veneer of "the Western market drugs are held to higher standards," while talking out the other side of their face to India and China about how the drugs they are being sold are "just as safe and effective, but much more economical", when, in reality, it's often the exact same production processes, sometimes coming from the exact same factories.
These same business practices mean that the drug companies will sell the same pills on either side of the US-Canadian border at very different prices.
All Trump is trying to do is make it legal for people to end-run this price protection scheme... it's not an altogether bad idea, but it is a big slap in the face to IP market protection - which would probably cost him politically, if he had any future in politics.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:10PM (13 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:29PM (6 children)
It's also unsurprising when you get cornered in a dark alley by a thief with a gun that he demand all your valuables and then shoot you in the foot so you can't run after him, particularly when the police have a reputation of never doing anything about it.
Unsurprising, but not the state I want to drive the world toward.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 13 2019, @04:33PM (5 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @06:04PM (4 children)
For all of their failings, government has given me police which are 98% non-corrupt, at least a semblance of education for most of my neighbors, an overgrown military which at least hasn't drafted anyone in my family in the last 60 years (or any family for the last 45), roads, somewhat safe food and water, and better than should be expected weather forecasts.
They also happen to ensure that most of my neighbors have at least the opportunity for enough food to eat and shelter, which dramatically reduces the need for police.
These things don't come cheap. It's easy to cry foul when power hungry corrupt individuals defraud the system and steal "OUR TAX DOLLARS," but, on balance, I feel less ripped off by the city, state and federal government than I do by the medical industry, insurance industry, even automotive and fuel industries (except, of course, when the feds have been in collusion with the fuel industry to abuse that overgrown military AND rape us at the gas pump simultaneously...)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:34AM (2 children)
Hurray for extremely low standards. So what, if your government has many failings? We can always find something, if we look hard enough, that the government isn't too badly incompetent or malicious at. Let's review some of the problems with the stuff you wrote. First, you have no clue how corrupt your police force is, but 2% is highly optimistic and situational. A semblance of education means what? They drafted people in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was just via a legal mechanism that snagged people who served in the previous few years. Your government spends freely on new road construction, but has this mysterious trouble in finding money to maintain existing roads. Somewhat safe? And shiny weather forecasts (the relative non-failing appears).
Most of your neighbors do that for themselves.
"Except of course..." pretty much kills the point. It's always interesting how people gloss over the corruption and waste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:49PM (1 child)
Time to swab out your brain cavity. They addressed the corruption and waste specifically to address the outliers where we're being ripped off by the gov AND corps. Yet you turn it around like some sort of attack.
This is the kind of disingenuous bullshit people don't like from you, maybe go re-read the comments on your whiny journal entry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 17 2019, @12:50AM
In addition to the above example in this thread, we have someone dismissing [soylentnews.org] the claim that "resources are preferentially going to the older generations" with the moral assertion that "most healthcare supports those who are older (preventive care aside) is pretty much the way it ought to work". It still means that they just granted said preferential allocation of resources.
Don't want the "disingenuous bullshit" obvious rebuttal? Then don't make the Wizard of Oz fallacy. We're never going to agree that the Wizard of Oz is mysterious and all powerful when we can see him running around like a chimpanzee behind the curtain. The mention of a counterexample never negates the counterexample. It's time to learn that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:16AM
Thank you for the rational and realistic post. The government is not, on the whole, that bad, because it at least provides us with service. The real rpoblem is the corporations who are infecting our governmental process with their undue and over concentrated influence without the reasoned mind of real individuals, which is what our system was institued to service and be run by. We really need to get industry in this country back on track to enriching our lives, rather than being used as vehicles of theft and destruction
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:22PM (5 children)
Um, no. In a free market there's lots of competition, which drives the market price down to the cost of production (including amortized capital costs and interest).
Far from being the point of a free market, high profits are a sure sign that you don't actually have one. If you did, someone else would have swooped in and started selling the same goods with half the profit margin to make a killing.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:19PM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 16 2019, @02:20AM (3 children)
Who said anything about asymmetry?
In a well functioning free market there's many producers and many consumers. And if there's many producers then, irrespective of how many consumers there are, there's no way to charge substantially more than cost for your commodity goods - all the (rational) consumers will buy from another producer selling at a lower price while still making a profit.
Of course, if the profit margins aren't large enough to be appealing then the producers will shift production to some more profitable product, but the net result is that all products on the market will see roughly the same profit margins.
The only ways to sell at a price substantially more than cost is to:
1) promote irrational consumer behavior (a.k.a. marketing),
2) collude with all/most of the other producers to artificially raise prices, or
3) establish a monopoly so that you don't have to collude with anyone else.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 16 2019, @07:38AM (2 children)
Your whole post was presented in terms that were asymmetric, so you did. As you did in the above response.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 16 2019, @01:43PM (1 child)
Looking at one part of an equation is not necessarily asymmetric, except in attention.
In a free market price is determined by the intersection of the cost and demand curves. But that's just another way of saying that commodities will be sold at (roughly) cost, though it adds the detail that the cost will change depending on the volume being produced.
Please feel free to explain things more fully if you have a solid argument against that basic assumption of free-market economics.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday August 18 2019, @10:10AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves