Posted on 08/23/2020 6:18:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
President Trump has again proven that he is a man of action. He says what he means and means what he says. He is all about results.
For over a generation, Americans have been held hostage by the drug companies. We are the largest market, yet we have been forced to pay the highest prices in the industrialized world. Not just a little more. A lot more. Elites in Washington with gold-plated insurance don’t see this. Millions of average American families do.
Look at insulin for example. Recently, a vile of insulin carried a retail price of $300 here in the states. In Canada, that same vile sold for only $32. Insulin was purified so that it could be administered to humans about a century ago by two Canadian researchers, Fredrick Banting and Charles Herbert Best. It was a lifesaver for millions of diabetics around the world. The researchers sold their rights for $1 to the University of Toronto, where they were working. To rapidly ramp up production, the University signed a licensing agreement with a gentleman named Eli Lilly.
For decades the Lilly company and diabetics had a friendly, symbiotic relationship. Lilly produced a high-quality product and sold it at a fair price to people who desperately needed it. The company made a fair profit and began developing other therapies. Somewhere things went off the rails.
In the ’80s, the drug industry began claiming it wanted to protect us from potentially dangerous drugs. Their lobbyists warned of the dangers of what they called diversion. They touted the possible dangers of counterfeit and potentially adulterated drugs entering our supply chain.
These “possibly” counterfeit drugs “could” be coming in from other countries. Congress needed to do something. Ever noticed how often special interests fan the flames of some danger (real or imagined) to help pass something that will benefit them? The hard evidence of the danger of diversion and importation was at best, sparse.
So Congress, eager to protect the health and safety of their constituents, took action to protect us from these supposed dangers. Members of Congress may not have understood exactly what they were doing, Pharma execs and their lobbyists certainly did.
Congress gave the pharmaceutical companies trade protections that no other industry enjoys. In 1987, Congress passed The Prescription Drug Marketing Act. Principally, the act prohibited the re-importation of Rx drugs from other countries where the companies sold them much cheaper.
At the Oval Office signing ceremony, President Reagan admitted to having “mixed feelings.” Saying that the magnitude of the dangers posed from diversion was far from clear. He warned of potential unintended consequences. The president feared that the legislation could reduce competition. He understood that the act granted enormous unchecked market power to the drug industry and it could be used to hold Americans hostage. Prophetically he said, “To be specific, I am very concerned that this legislation could impose on the sick and the elderly increased prices for prescription drugs.”
Reagan was concerned enough that he instructed his attorney general to monitor the implementation of the bill and to make recommendations if they found abuses. The industry was smart enough to wait until the watchdogs had gone to sleep before they began to fully exploit their new market power.
The abuse continued to morph and metastasize into the outrageous mess we have today. Americans now pay 300 percent more than Canadians for many drugs.
Finally, a populist president saw the abuses and promised to do something about it. By his recent executive action, President Trump tore down the wall that held Americans hostage. With a stroke of his pen, Trump leveled the playing field. Drug companies will be forced to renegotiate. Canadians and Europeans will likely be paying a little more for pharmaceuticals. We will be paying a lot less. Opening markets will save Americans and their insurance carriers at least $50 billion per year.
It’s one more example of this historic president keeping his promises and putting Americans first. By taking this bold action he struck a blow against trade barriers while recovering one of the Gipper’s few fumbles.
There are so many legislative tricks that prevent them from having to vote on any legislation that may embarrass them, they can appear to be clean.
This is why Trump is so hated, even by pubbies that pretend to be on our side.
“This is why Trump is so hated, even by pubbies that pretend to be on our side”.
Exactly. Donald Trump is showing the entire country(those that pay attention anyway) how inept/corrupt the political class has been/is. He’s blown what little cover they had and they hate him for doing this.
Any drug with EU marketing approval should be allowed to be sold in the USA, but no insurer should be required to pay for a drug without FDA approval .
Canada has removed the USA from its payented medicine price cap setting system.
On the other hand, the term vile is used as an adjective which means “extremely unpleasant,” “morally despicable or abhorrent,” or “of little worth or account.”
Doesn't anyone proofread any longer? It's "vial." The English language is dead . . .
The middle class pays for everything and the elitists, the illegals and the generationally entitled get it for free
The French government sets a maximum price any French insurer has to pay for a drug.
The drug maker can lawfully sell at a higher price, but any French insurer can refuse to pay the drugmaker set price.
CANADA GETS IT’S MEDS FROM CHINA. SO ALL YOU DO IS SUPPORT CHINA. EMBARGO AND RUIN THEM.
Even though the law is on the books you can buy many many drugs online at the Canadian pharmacy and have them mailed. I have personally ordered Evista, Robaxin and Cipro numerous times at reduced cost and no prescription.
The high price of drugs is buried in grocery store and Walmart prices.
When stores raise prices in January, it is often because of higher health insurance premiums.
And yet the leftists and never-Trumpers will find something to hate about this. And the leftist that benefit from it will never admit that they do.
The FDA (Foot Dragging Administration) will raise hell. They will point back to the thalidomide disaster that hit Europe because the Europeans approved of thalidomide to be given to pregnant women too quickly and as a result, tens of thousands of babies were born deformed. And the ONLY reason the FDA hadn’t approved of thalidomide in the US was because not because of an abundance of caution (which they like to claim) but because of bureaucratic foot dragging.
That has been their reasoning for the slow and expensive process of getting new drugs to market ever since.
At least what they were doing was vile.
Brian Griffin wrote:
“Any drug with EU marketing approval should be allowed to be sold in the USA, but no insurer should be required to pay for a drug without FDA approval .”
If the EU approved drugs are cheap (example: insulin for $33) , we wouldn’t need insurance to pay for them anyway.
Right you are.
And again I missed one that someone else then pointed out.
The illiteracy in journalism is astounding, and I’ve been trying to point it out as much as possible, hoping some of these clowns will start to proofread...
In my younger days, any magazine or newspaper had an editor whose job it was to proofread every article, and correct such spelling and grammar issues, as well as when someone used the completely wrong word, as in this case. And there are others...
Too, to
Lose, loose
Your, you’re
where, wear, were, we’re
toe the line, tow the line (the former is correct)
I can’t remember the others, guess I need to compile a list...
And there’s more. That’s just the beginning of the inept and incompetent writing I see in journalism every day, and it’s also in some of the biggest and most well respected news organizations in the country...
I am NOT for socialized medicine.
What we have in the U.S. is an entire critical industry that is controlled lock stock and barrel by drug companies and insurance companies. If you look at the largest lobbying groups about half of them are drug makers and medical insurance, they’re spending untold amounts of money buying our corrupt congress and the results pay off for them, they’re not spending that money for nothing. Go to any decent sized U.S. city and see who owns the largest, most elaborate buildings, it’s always drug makers and insurance.
I’m a hard core capitalist but capitalism requires an even playing field, we don’t have that now. Our government has been bought by drug and insurance companies who have removed capitalism from healthcare, they fleece Americans with impunity now which is why our healthcare is so outrageous. It’s NOT because of research costs, and it’s not because doctors are making too much money. It’s because a select few at the top are making billions from a rigged system that they’ve bought and paid for. Obamacare, while purporting to lower health care costs, did the exact opposite because it was just a handout to the very guys that are fleecing us. It’s a dream come true for health insurers to have government mandate that people buy your incredibly overpriced product. The LAST thing we need is more government giveways like Obamacare to the insurance and drug industry.
What needs to be done is to break the monopolies these companies have on health care, we need a Teddy Roosevelt. We also need an American public that isn’t so gullible that they parrot the lines like “research costs are so high they have to recover their money”. That’s BS, research costs are a small part of the cost of drugs in the U.S., the vast majority of the cost is just grossly inflated profit margins because they can get away with it.
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