Quote:
Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
Re: 2. Did the regulators take the position that the drugs won't be allowed at all in their jurisdictions, or just that the drugs will be provided in an extra-legal manner? This is really my fundamental question here... did someone threaten to violate patents of the U.S. pharamaceutical industry as a nation?
|
I am not aware of any threats to permit drugs in a non-legal manner if the pharma doesn't play along with a lower pricing scheme; in most cases, that would violate a number of treaties as well. But we're talking about why, globally, drugs cost less everywhere else, and there are certainly some countries out there where our patents are already not worth the paper they are printed on.
Quote:
Re: Bottom line. Exactly. I'm told the same thing, and it offends me to no end that the risk/reward tends to overwhelmingly favor Amermican risk-taking companies, but at the expense of American consumers. Some of these countries have per-capita incomes almost equal to ours. It sounds entirely like a free-rider/strong-arm theft problem.
Hello
|
It is clear that Americans bear a disproportionate amount of the cost of drug development, but some of this appears to be the result of different supply and demand dynamics here (we simply demand more) and different cost structures here. Some of it is an unwillingness to adopt other strategies to lower drug costs (such as bulk purchasing). This is a case where we have to define an appropriate role for government to enable the lower of our costs and the sharing of costs with other countries, but where we probably do not want a government as interventionist as some of the foreign ones. Bush, however, has been completely hands off, letting a very unfree market do what it does.
