White House, GOP forced to take a new look at importing drugs from Canada

The Bush administration and Republican congressional leaders are being forced to take a hard new look at the idea of importing cheaper prescription drugs from foreign countries as an election-year clamor grows for removing prohibitions.

Continuing increases in prescription drug prices -- the fastest growing item in health care -- and the pitched partisan battle over the new Medicare law have given the topic greater prominence in Congress and on the campaign trail.

We're talking about seniors who are going to bed tonight making the decision whether to pay for prescription drugs or to eat,"

Oh, BS. I lived next door to a lady just like that – complain, complain, complain. Waaa – bananas are $0.79/lb and I have to eat two daily with my medicine. “What do they think – money grows on trees?” Meanwhile, she’s sitting in a $600,000 house with a $40,000 car she can’t drive - but she wants free/cheap medicine. Boo hoo.

Time to sell the house, get an efficiency apartment, sell the car, and buy your own medicine so your heirs won’t have to worry so much about the tax consequences on their inheritance. IMO.

But she wouldn’t sell anything – not a bed, not a couch, not the four bedroom home. Wouldn’t sell that POS even though vacuuming and cleaning it led to her death IMO. (But granted, that may be a convenient conclusion to draw for various reasons. Ha.)

[She always had to move the couch and beds and vacuum under them at 86 years of age. She was moving a bed and did something to her back. Then they started putting her on painkillers that made her goofy. Then her back would “catch” causing her to sort of jerk in pain. That jerking led to her falling and breaking her hip. Dead two weeks later. I guess she thought she’d take it all with her… -but that’s what your assets are for – paying your bills when you don’t have the resources otherwise. Time to liquidate a portion. IMO]

The solution is to make the rest of the world pay fairmarket value

You almost get it. The solution is to allow Americans to buy drugs on the world market at uncontrolled prices. They outsource our jobs and expect us to work for free, so why should they expect us to go on paying monopoly prices for our prescriptions?

Canada is must one small corner of the world market. Because Canada keeps its drug prices down through price controls, only 43% of the drugs sold in America are even available there. In the uncontrolled drug market of Switzerland on the other hand, all medications, including those not available here because they're still stuck in the FDA's infinitely long small intestine, are available. The prices, though higher than Canada's, are still less than in the US.

Watch investment in new drugs PLUMMET if this passes. Of course the Democrat Party Operatives would love that, because then they could insist on higher taxes for GOVERNMENT funded research of drugs. Then the government could set the price of drugs and even sell them, creating more dependency of the citizenry upon an ever growing bureaucracy.

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