From the Department of Unintentional Humor

I found this article at Politico hilarious:

Importing prescription drugs from Canada has long been seen as an easy solution to skyrocketing drug prices for U.S. patients.

But now that President Donald Trump and Democrats are pushing to make those cross-border sales legal, Canadian health experts are issuing a dire warning: It could destroy Canada’s drug market.

Attempting to fill the United States’ needs with pharmaceuticals from its much smaller northern neighbor could sap supplies in Canada, creating shortages and driving up prices in a government-run health system that itself is struggling to make drugs affordable, opponents of the import proposals say. And the result, they say, would be little if any relief for high prices in the United States.

Yep. That’s the way that markets work all right. Supply and demand. That is the complaint that Americans are expressing. Companies have been granted monopolies and they’re using those monopolies to gouge consumers. Consumers quite understandably seek to evade the companies’ predatory pricing by buying from lower-priced sources.

There are multiple solutions to this problem. We could (and IMO should) reform our intellectual property laws. We could impose price caps. We could subsidize consumers (and, coincidentally, producers). We could impose a complicated regime of of subsidies, regulations, and taxes (thereby maximizing the opportunities for graft—it’s the American way!).

Or Canadians could pay the prevailing U. S. market prices for pharmaceuticals. They are presently being protected by U. S. law. What U. S. law hath given U. S. law can take away.

1 comment… add one
  • steve Link

    Nice little piece on prices in health care.

    https://angrybearblog.com/2019/02/again-healthcare-cost-drivers-pharma-doctors-and-hospitals.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Hzoh+%28angrybearblog.com%29

    “The increase in annual diabetes spending between 1996 and 2013 was $64.4 billion of which $44.4 billion of this increase was pharmaceutical spending. Said another way, two-thirds of the increase in treating diabetes was due simply to the increased pricing of pharmaceutical companies.

    And yes, there should be time spent on changing habits where it can be changed and providing the means to do so. However, in 1996 Eli Lilly’s Humalog was $21 per vial. By 2017, the price increased to $275 (700%) for a vial which equates to a one-month supply.

    Why has the cost of Humalog increased? “The truth is the improvements in new formularies of old versions which are marginally different, and the clinical benefits of them over the older drugs have been zero.” Just like slapping “new and improved” on the labels of food products with a change of ingredients (which qualifies under USDA and FDA labeling regs)., pharmaceuticals can play the same game and they do.

    As the article (“Eli Lilly Raised U.S. Prices Of Diabetes Drug 700 Percent Over 20 Years”) explains, “most patients do not pay the full cost/price of a drug up front and absorb their portion of the cost via an increase in monthly healthcare premiums.” This leads to pharmaceutical companies charging as much as the U.S. insurance companies will let them. Both parties profiting from increased prices. Perhaps Alex Azar the Secretary of Healthcare can explain it better as he was an officer of Eli Lilly when Humalog began its ascend?”

    We take the crooks who are jacking up the prices and put them in charge. How many remember that the scientists who worked out insulin sold their rights to it for a dollar apiece and that the right to manufacture were given to companies like Lilly royalty free?

    Steve

Leave a Comment