Posted on 04/28/2019 7:00:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
It will cripple American medical innovation? Seniors would lose access to modern, lifesaving drugs? Those are a couple of the dire warnings being advanced by the drug industry and a few of their friends. Spots are running on conservative talk radio. We can guess who is actually paying for those ads.
The cause of all this angst is a fairly modest proposal by the Trump Administration to collect reference (comparative) pricing for Rx drugs from other industrialized countries. All sides agree that this will put U.S. drug pricing under a much hotter spotlight and give the President a stronger bargaining hand. Donald Trump prefers negotiating from strength. Remember, he wasn’t elected on an America Last agenda.
One side of the debate clearly does not want this to happen. They are spending serious money to try to quash it.
They know the truth. And the truth will alter the Pharmaceuticals’ business models. It will be a bitter pill for them. The unvarnished truth is that we Americans are forced to pay more for prescription drugs than anyone else in the free world. Not just a little more. A lot more. This proposal will begin to level the playing field. The inflation rate for drugs has been greater than any other product or service for more than a decade. It is a critical driver of our runaway healthcare costs.
“Rising drug prices are the root cause of healthcare’s cost problem,” Merrill Goozner, Editor Emeritus of Modern Healthcare.
The drug industry knows that this will lay the groundwork for much more aggressive price negotiations for Medicare and other healthcare plans. It may even start to crack open markets, allowing Americans to legally import drugs from other countries like Canada. We can freely import almost anything else. We just renegotiated NAFTA, getting a better deal. Except of course for prescription drugs. The one category of free trade that could save us Billions.
So now the folks at PhARMA are engaged in a new disinformation campaign. They are trying to make us believe that if our government does a little price shopping in say Germany, the next cure for cancer or incontinence will never happen. We won’t have “access” to the next lifesaving therapy. I really don’t like that word, access. It’s theirs, not mine.
Get a grip.
That’s like saying if our government does a little homework and finds that “socialist” Germany is buying their fighter aircraft for 300 percent less than we are, we won’t have access to the next generation of fighter jets. Does anyone believe that? Maybe Germans are just better negotiators than we are. Or maybe we just have stupid tattooed to our foreheads.
No more.
Boeing and Lockheed plow a lot of money into research to produce the next generation of aircraft with no guarantee that anyone will buy them. Some may say, oh but the government helps to underwrite some of those costs. True. That same government, through the CDC, NIH and various other agencies underwrites much of the research costs for developing the next generation drug as well.
Researchers at Bentley University conducted a lengthy study to determine just how much the pharmaceutical companies benefit from taxpayer subsidized research. They poured through millions of pages of research documents. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They found that of the 210 new drugs approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2016, all 210 of them benefited from molecular research funded by the U.S. taxpayer.
Thanks to legislation known as Bayh-Dole, we taxpayers get NO royalties for our investment. And thanks to our foolish, we won’t negotiate policy, we get to pay the highest prices in the world for those same drugs.
Unless we conservatives get serious about controlling drug and healthcare costs, we will wind up with the worst of all worlds. Market forces cannot work where participants are granted monopoly powers. Fortunately, we have a President who instinctively gets this. Like Teddy Roosevelt, he understands that when monopolies abuse their power, it is up to government to intervene and level the playing field.
Doing a little homework, confirming what others are paying for Rx drugs is a smart first step.
The call of the Left: DEPEND ON GOVERNMENT!
The call of Patriots: REGAIN YOUR INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM FROM GOVERNMENT!!!
It is a very old drug and has been a miracle drug for huge numbers of people for decades.
What is the solution to such greed over such effective drugs?
That may be true, but the article misses the entire reason for high drug prices - government mandated costs for approvals of new drugs. It costs 1 to 3 billion dollars to obtain FDA approval to putt a new drug on the market. The process usually takes about ten years, requires a patent which details the method of making the drug, and uses up half of the time of the patent protection. This means the drug company has only about ten years to recoup the entire approval cost. They must also recover the approval costs for drugs that are not approved.
These billions must all come out of the price for new drugs on the market. I, for one, don't want to kill the goose laying the new drug golden eggs. I never knew either of my grand fathers, as they died before I was born. The drugs that would have saved them, had they been available at the time they died, are now given away free as a loss leader at my local drug store.
Don't stop the development of new drugs by turning the pharmaceutical industry into aspirin companies that sell only hundred year old drugs.
My immediate concern is what guarantees to we have that medicines manufactured overseas will be safe? Do they have the same standards as American manufacturers?
The only thing that always works is a free market. Government regulation, not greed, is the problem. It is certainly NOT the solution.
Socialist countries refuse to pay market prices, i.e., they refuse to pay for research.
We pay market prices so we are subsidizing the socialist countries. If we have govt control of drug prices, new drugs will decrease.
If the govt takes over drug research, we will get the same result. Govt is risk averse because there is no upside(profits) to taking that risk.
The solution is free markets not more socialism.
Agreed. I would also posit that our increasingly socialist insurance ideas are ultimately raising the costs, AND perhaps WE are subsidizing all those “much cheaper than this country” foreign drugs, who don’t have all these costs. IOW, they get most of their drugs from the US, which has already borne the burden, and don’t demand all the ridiculous rules we have. I wonder what will happen if suddenly Americans get to pay dirt cheap like all those foreigners. At first. Then I suspect the supply will dry up and the price will skyrocket for everyone.
Must be time for the annual “price controls are good for you” articles.
Agreed. Perhaps another example of Trump not quite being what he is cracked up to be.
Get rid of the middle man.. big health insurers who are bilking everyone with a false sense of security while driving up prices everywhere.
Make everyone pay a dollar or ten each time they visit a doctor or fill a prescription. Costs would drop so fast your head would spin.
“The only thing that always works is a free market. ”
Yes. Go to open pricing and competition, with annual vouchers and HSAs as incentive. Eliminate fraud and money-grubbing lawsuits. The R’s in the mid-90’s had healthcare reform ideas, contrary to what our MSM says. (We had Gingrich’s Contract with America, too).
https://khn.org/news/gop-1993-health-reform-bill/
Interesting that gov seems always AGAINST free market, no?
Gov loves control: BATF, CIA, DHS, DOD, DOEn, DOEd, DOJ, DOT, EPA, FBI, FDA, HUD, IRS, OSHA...which of these fed entities has any mention in COTUS?
“...perhaps WE are subsidizing all those “much cheaper than this country” foreign drugs...”
Our own drug manufacturers got in bed with China for cost reduction, then China underpriced them out of business. Many were base ingredient makers. The book China Rx covers this. A large share of drugs for our military come only from China. Y’all comfortable with this?
Well, the President can start this off with some type of hearing, public one of course.
And then he can invite Joe Manchin’s daughter and have her explain why the company she worked for decided to jack the price of an Epi-Pen through the roof?
Shkreli does the same thing and he’s in prison. Amazing.
Knowing that the companies have to recoup the price of R&D, what should also be taken into account is how much money they got from the Feds/Taxpayer in that same R&D process. And those amounts should be taken out.
An article from a while back, someone responded to me about how the drug companies, to keep generics from being made and avoid competition, have figured out another way to game the system. I forgot what they told me, but I think it had something to do with licensing, maybe. Not sure.
But, I do know one thing, an AdVair disc(for asthma) used to cost around $180 and with a coupon from the company which the pharmacy would usually supply, you’d get the price down to around $120. Now, retail is closer to $400 and if you go through insurance, it’s much higher than that. No generic and amazingly, I know you’ll all be shocked, that the prices started going through the roof some time around 2009 or 2010, when a certain piece of legislation was passed in the middle of the night and we all had to pass it, to see what was in it.
Xolair. $2,000 in the US. $150 in Canada.
food is your best medicine, or managing your food. Fasting is good for you. Water is good for you. I see all these men with huge guts. Taking blood pressure meds. Taking rat poison (warfarin) because of heart issues. Walking is good for you. Losing weight is good for you. Sunshine is good for you.
I’ve been taking PremPro for over 15 years. That has been on the market longer than that. there is NO generic because (I am told by dr) they keep changing the ingredients to keep it from becoming generic. Used to be $60/month - I paid $645 for 3 months in January. WHAT A CROCK!
> What is the solution to such greed over such effective drugs?
If you ask me, vigilante action would solve a lot of problems. Why should a person who puts essential lifesaving medicine out of the reach of others - on purpose, for the reason of greed only, and not in any way earned on merit - be treated as anything more than a mass murderer or serial killer?
Other countries have price controls on drugs that prevent the manufacturers from recouping R&D costs on non-US sales. Thus, the price Americans pay is higher than it should be, because we are not only paying for our share, but also other countries’ shares of development costs.
In addition, if one would examine the cost of R&D that is paid by the government, one would find that the government only pays the initial costs of developing some (not all) new drugs. Once a drug is ready for clinical testing, the government lets the pharmaceutical companies bear the costs.
This is a very complicated issue, but the bottom line is that innovation *will* stop if drug companies cannot recoup R&D costs. And don’t expect the government to step in to fill the gap.
The only reason Pharmaceuticals can abused American customers is because of government policy interfering in the free market. You can’t import drugs from other countries. So if you really want a free market price for pills, maybe the government should let us import things from other countries
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