Posted on 05/09/2016 7:13:29 AM PDT by SatinDoll
Oh yes it is.
"My parents were just vacationing in Europe (they go often so they're aware of how stuff works). My mom is diabetic and had a shortage of insulin while in France, they went to the drugstore and she showed the bottle of Humalog which is what she uses in the United States and the price in the United States is around $240 a bottle which is charged to her Medicare and insurance and can only be prescribed by her doctor."
"The pharmacist recognized the bottle and without having to go to a doctor sold her a bottle of insulin for US $25.00."
"This is the same brand made by Eli Lilly that she gets in the United States and why in the in the world that should be 1/10 of the price without having to go to the doctor for a prescription."
[Quoted with permission.]
Note this well folks: No prescription needed and 1/10th the price for the exact same drug.
Now fill your suitcase and bring same home with you and you'll go to prison. Note that you're not counterfeiting anything, you're not adulterating anything and you lawfully own that which you're bringing into the country for the purpose of nothing other than making a profit.
If this price-fixing, which is supposed to be a felony under 15 USC was to be stopped then the drug would cost $25/bottle -- or slightly more, since of course the person bringing it would like to make a profit -- here.
Even with a reasonable profit -- say, $5/bottle -- it would still collapse the price in the United States instantly.
Is it all drugs? No, definitely not, but the same issue applies to both procedures and supplies.
Put a stop to the racket and the cost of obtaining medical care, whether it be drug, device, service or procedure will drop like a stone. Further, no new laws are actually necessary since between 15 USC and state consumer protection laws are plenty-sufficient on their own. The entire rubric of "must buy insurance or be bankrupted by any material medical emergency" certainly fits the definition of a force-tied sale that also facially appears to be unlawful under that very same body of law.
You have been and are today being robbed with the explicit cooperation and assistance of the Federal and State governments folks. If it is not stopped now these practices will, within the next few years, consume the entirety of the Federal Budget at which point our economy and probability political system will collapse.
Several years ago I was in Buenos Aires working on a job and got an infection. Sore throat, fever, the works. I had a major presentation In two days. I called down to the concierge and asked what do I need to do to get a prescription for erythromycin, strongest dosage.
30 minutes later there was a knock on my door with my prescription.
When I was going to college in Tucson in the mid 80s my dad used to have me drive down to Nogales, Mexico to buy him Atrovent inhalers for $3 retail each. These were costing him over $100 in United States with a $20 co-pay from his insurance. His out-of-pocket was one third of the co-pay in the US! After a couple years of doing this the federal government got around to making it illegal but I kept going. I got stopoed a number times by border patrol agents at the gate who looked at the inhalers, looked at me, and just gave me the nod to keep going and I got through. Not all Americans working for the government are schmucks.
The cost of research is not the real cost, navigating through the bureaucratic nightmare of the FDA is. It costs anywhere from $1 billion to $5 billion to get a major drug approved, and only 1 in 3 makes it. The other major cost is when lawyers sue for side effects “caused by the drug”. No drug is side effect free. Thanks to the “I won the lottery”attitude of plaintiffs, somebody has to pay the cost.
Thank you! This truth does not get stated often enough.
We are subsidizing the price controls imposed by other countries.
For many of our drugs there is no good reason why they cannot be over the counter. Nobody is going to abuse insulin.
To the tune of 500 million per compound. That doesnt include compounds that dont make it through.
???? I'm confused.
Same thing occurs or used to occur along the Texas border towns. I don’t know if it is
still the case. I’ve known people that would go there once every three months and get their
scripts filled. You could get a prescription written there if you didn’t have one with you.
The drug companies could double their R&D budgets with what they spend on advertising alone.
We're being scammed by everyone in the supply chain except the doctors and pharmacists- the drug companies, their reps, the insurance companies, etc.
My wife needed a prescription refill in Europe and it was the same situation: $80-$90 a bottle here, paid 8 Euros for the same medicine in Athens. I have a friend who has dual citizenship in Europe-- his general rule of thumb is that the same medicine or medical procedure here is available for about 1/10 the cost in Europe.
If you use a hospital pharmacy, you're being robbed even more as they mark everything up 2 to 3 times the already outrageous price in a regular pharmacy.
In any other industry, they would be indicted for fraud.
If I get in an accident with my car, I get an estimate and I know right away how much my insurance will pay and how much I will be out of pocket. If I go to a hospital in the US, I never know whether I'll leave bankrupt, even with $1200 a month medical insurance.
Trump is right when he pushes for a national insurance pool like Germany's. But if we have a national insurance pool like Germany's (with a reformed disability insurance system like theirs), we don't need malpractice lawsuits, because there's no social utility in it. If you're injured by a medical procedure, you're still covered. If the procedure is genuine malpractice (as found be a medical review board), then the practitioner needs to have their license or privileges yanked. And we don't need to pay some land shark 33% of the disability and medical payments.
Be careful what you wish for.
We pay for research and development. Plus the welfare state. And on top of that via legislation we the tax payers pay for the lobbyist donor pacs that buy politicians.
I laughed out loud when I read it: $36,000.
Ludicrous.
Why does that stop the drug companies from charging the same, or more, for overseas drug sales?
Maybe-- I was just in a supermarket in the Netherlands a few weeks ago: meat prices were about the same (high). Prices for other foods like milk, cheese and bread seemed about the same or much less for higher quality goods.
Europeans walk (or bike) much more than Americans, although compared to 25 years ago (the last time I was there), the lard-bottom effect of too much time at a computer is beginning to show up (especially among the young) in both Holland and Germany.
If you break the demographics down, US healthcare is about the same quality except for advanced cancer treatment, where we are clearly much better.
Why sell for less?
And for most of those 5000 years, life expectancy was about 40 years. Infant and child mortality was huge, the average woman had about 13 pregnancies in her lifetime, and two or three of those babies born lived to be adults. Drugs are a good thing, not evil!
“Or, people would just stop going to a doctor until the catastrophic insurance kicked in because they collapsed with cancer or some other untreated condition.
Be careful what you wish for.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I think it would make healthcare costs more competitive because people would be smarter consumers if they have to make such decisions themselves. Competition would drive prices down on lots of things. Right now - you have expensive Obamacare monthly costs - and sometimes up to a $6000 deductible - you can barely afford the COST of having to have insurance that covers every little thing and has to include existing conditions at the same cost to everybody.
That’s money you have to spend just to have the insurance to cover most of your healthcare costs. I submit that on non-catastrophic healthcare - it would cost you less to pay with HSA funds and out-of-pocket, than you’re paying just to have the coverage for it, with an insurance company being the middle man and government crony.
Why not, if your profits are already guaranteed? Few nations around this world have the kind of regulations for so called quality control than we do. Patents also play a part in the cost of meds... There is advertising costs, and buying politician costs.. NOT all costs are specifically related to research and development. Plus in socialized nations they have a monetary amount set aside for the majority to cover the cost of meds.
He had to become a staff doctor with the hospital his group was affiliated with.
the illegals come here to the US because we've subsidized all their health care already and all their social security demands and we wonder why they come here....its FREE to them....
insulin is cheap in Europe because we've already PAID for it here...
IOWS, we have been shafted not once, but twice....we paid for the infrastructure and now we pay the most for what that infrastructure produces...
ain't life grand?
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