Raise the price.
Another poor suffereing corporations myth. The medication which I would like to be cheaper can be bought in Europe in generic form for 10% of price. And it was invented IN FRANCE and the pharma company selling it in USA is GERMAN.
I'm all for that provided you serve as the official "taster". I see no reason to put myself at risk on behalf of your ideological blinders.
"Until there is some evidence that imported drugs are harming the health of Americans in considerable numbers, the case is still the null set to ban the imports. "
The whole issue of the importation of Canadian drugs is about to become irrelevant. The Canadian Government is considering legislation to ban cross border sales by direct purchase or through internet pharmacies not because Canadian drugs are unsafe but rather American prescriptions cannot be verified.
In Canada in order to get any prescription you have to visit a doctor and be determined by diagnosis in writing that you are suffering from a condition that the drug in question is considered a conventional treatment.
If you don't see a doctor registered to practice in the province you are living you don't get the prescription. It's as simple as that.
The value of medicines
A quarter of the world's top 100 medicines were discovered and developed in Britain, more than any country except the USA.
The industry invested £3.5billion in UK research and development in 2002 - nearly £10 million every day.
Pharmaceutical companies carry out nearly a quarter of all industrial research and development in the UK and spend more than a fifth of their turnover on R & D.
UK pharmaceutical industry exports in 2003 were an estimated £11.8 billion, creating a record trade surplus of £3.1 billion. Exports per employee in 2003 were around £150,000.
The pharmaceutical industry provides the nation's medicines to the NHS at a daily cost of just 40 pence per person - less than half of what we spend on alcoholic drinks.
Medicines account for only about 13 per cent of total NHS costs, despite a constant growth every year in the number of prescriptions issued.
http://www.abpi.org.uk/
There seems to be a myth that Europe does not do Pharma research.
Guess what we do! So does Japan and Canada.
http://www.cordis.lu/eims/src/eims-r32.htm
This paper maps the recent innovation record of the European pharmaceutical industry vis-à-vis its US and Japanese counterparts. On the whole it is a story of success. German and Swiss chemical firms were amongst the world's first pharmaceutical manufacturers, establishing the tradition of a research-based industry. That tradition still survives, and although in the post-war world US multinationals came to dominate world markets, European companies have held their own and remain amongst world leaders with UK firms, in particular, rising up the rankings. A number of factors - the rising cost of R&D needed to meet regulatory requirements, the squeeze imposed on public health care budgets and the introduction of biotechnology - have combined to challenge the established routines of the industry in the 1980s. Firms have responded with a series of strategies - collaborations and alliances; mergers and attempts to develop new markets. The paper analyses the innovative performance and strategies adopted by different European firms in the face of these challenges. It examines different measures of innovation - R&D, patenting, the introduction of new chemical entities, and sales of top selling drugs - and finds none of them wholly satisfactory as a measure of innovation. In particular they fail to pick up new developments in biotechnology which is increasingly dominating routes to new drug discover and new treatments. The paper concludes that Europe's industry is at present holding its own through a mixture of collaboration and international merger. However, it is vital for the industry to be underpinned by a vibrant and creative science base if it is to meet the challenge of the coming decades.