5 ms·

In the US, we have a ban on re-importing cheaper drugs which our companies produce. Congress did that. We do not admit competitive medications from other first

• briffle 8y ago
  congress also banned medicare from negotiating drug prices...
  • maxerickson 8y ago
    Medicare Part D is provided by private companies that have formularies and negotiate prices and so on. That the government doesn't directly negotiate prices there is technically true and sort of beside the point.
    • dd36 8y ago
      Then why’d they forbid it?
    • refurb 8y ago
      Not sure why this is downvoted, as it's accurate. Private insurers are free to negotiate prices for Part D drugs on behalf of Medicare, which they do quite aggressively.
• refurb 8y ago
  The reason we did that is thalidomide.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    I don't think so. You can't even re import FDA approved drugs.
• rayiner 8y ago
  Painting the reimport ban (and the Medicare negotiating with drug companies point below) as a "competition" thing is highly misleading. Other countries distort the market price of drugs in those countries by leveraging their monopsony power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony) and imposing outright price controls. Keeping those distortions from affecting the U.S. market doesn't undermine "competition" any more than excluding highly-subsidized Chinese steel undermines "competition."
  • dcolkitt 8y ago
    Disagree, it does distort the market because it increases the monopsony power of the overseas purchasers. With zero frictions between the cross-border trade in prescription drugs, a drug manufacturer would have to set a uniform worldwide price for their drugs. Otherwise if they sold to France cheaper than they sold to the US, then US consumers would simply import the drugs from French vendors instead of paying the US list price.
    • dd36 8y ago
      Great point.
    • dantheman 8y ago
      And that's perfectly fine - we allow that for all sorts of other products. Will it cause the cost of healthcare in France to go up? Probably, but I don't see how that's a problem for the US.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      How is that different than any other good where people can arbitrage?
    • JamesBarney 8y ago
      They make so much money in the U.S. this would probably be more effective at raising world drug prices than lowering U.S. drug prices.
  • jayd16 8y ago
• cgriswald 8y ago
  > We do not admit competitive medications from other first world countries without full FDA approval. Congress did that. I don't see this as a problem. Even if I were to stipulate that all other first world countries have processes equal in safety requirements to that of the FDA, I still wouldn't see this as a problem. In a scenario without this, pharmaceutical companies would be able to pressure multiple government agencies until it found one willing to reduce its safety requirements. Then they could push all their drugs through that agency, making an end run around the more stringent requirements of the FDA.
  • bgorman 8y ago
    There have been drugs that have been approved in Europe, yet take more than a decade to get FDA approval. The FDA may be more stringent, but it certainly can be argued it is too slow to approve drugs. Even sunscreen is better in Europe due to the FDA.
    • chimeracoder 8y ago
      > Even sunscreen is better in Europe due to the FDA. I've looked into this. The sunscreens available in Europe are not necessarily better than the ones available in the US. For some people (like me), many of them are strictly worse - it depends on your skin type. But as for FDA approval, the relevant part of this thread, it's not clear that those should be approved in the US. A number of them have been found to be excreted in breast milk, which the FDA has specifically cited as an issue for approving them, and that is indeed a real problem.
      • malms 8y ago
        As a european: lol. Keep your weapons well keep our cheese ><
• dd36 8y ago
  Congress doesn’t act in a silo. They did all of that because it’s what their pharma donors demanded.
• sandworm101 8y ago
  >> ban on re-importing cheaper drugs which our companies produce. Good. Keep that ban. I'm in Canada. Allowing Americans to import drugs at our drug prices, the prices that our "communist" government negotiates on our behalf, would put undue pressure on our system. If the US ban were lifted Canada would probably be forced to ban/tax drug exports to protect itself. A single payer has far more negotiating power than a free market. Higher prices are the flip side of the "freedom" that is US healthcare. Don't like high prices? Do the hard work of setting up a properly unified nation health system. Don't look to piggyback on the national health systems of others.
• Bartweiss 8y ago
  We also have drug expiration dates set at the end of the span proven safe in clinical trials, and a requirement to throw them away after that. Even if the government has paid millions to prove the drugs stay good longer, that's a government-only decision the FDA won't let hospitals use. That's a solid billion dollars per year, just in Congress (via the FDA) forcing hospitals to throw away known-good medicines. It's sort of hard to fathom writing "despite Congress" in a headline like this. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-myth-of-drug-expiration-dates https://www.propublica.org/article/the-myth-of-drug-expirati...
• Pharmakon 8y ago
  Maybe “despite” was a typo for “as a direct result of,” in the article? Or maybe it’s just the usual Bloomberg nonsense. The whole interview reads like apologia. Oh it’s the legal teams of the pharmaceutical industry, rather than their lobbying efforts having fully purchased the loyalty of a majority of members from both parties. Get it? Congress is the victim here, not a goddamned co-conspirator.
• maxxxxx 8y ago
  "ban on re-importing cheaper drugs " This (and the Cuba travel ban as another example) seems outright "unamerican" to me. Where is the land of the free and the brave and personal responsibility?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• basch 8y ago
  > we have a ban on re-importing cheaper drugs which our companies produce. This continues to be one of the dumbest arguments on this topic. If you want the local price to change, change the intellectual property law that inflates their price in the first place, dont repeal bans that circumvent the intellectual property laws.
  • SkyBelow 8y ago
    If we ban the flow of physical goods to uphold IP laws, then would you also support banning the flow of digital goods to uphold IP laws? Imagine if we couldn't buy any electronic media that wasn't created in the US because it might break an IP law.
    • basch 8y ago
      A pill isnt a physical good, its a formula. You are paying for the intellectual property not the manufacture. It's not like the pills are substantially cheaper to manufacture in Canada, its different licensing costs. The question is more like "if Disney sets avengers to $3 per view in American and $1 in Canada, is it legal to use a VPN to appear Canadian, and pay the Canadian licensing price." If the answer is yes, then why not just let American's pay the Canadian price vs the ruse of streaming the data from another country and pretending the transaction is hunky dory. If impersonating a Canadian to watch Avengers is intellectual property infringement, underpaying the license in your country, the same logic should apply to other intellectual property.
      • chimeracoder 8y ago
        > A pill isnt a physical good, its a formula. You are paying for the intellectual property not the manufacture. It's not like the pills are substantially cheaper to manufacture in Canada, its different licensing costs. This thread is talking about reimportation of brand-name pharmaceuticals. In many of these cases, it's the same manufacturer producing the same physical goods at the same factory and selling them for two different prices on different sides of the border. This is not an "intellectual property" issue; it's a trade issue.
• LiquidSky 8y ago
  >We do not admit competitive medications from other first world countries without full FDA approval. Thalidomide. You lose.
  • CptFribble 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide > In the United States, Food & Drug Agency pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey M.D. withstood pressure from the Richardson-Merrell Pharmaceuticals Co. and refused [FDA] approval to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed. and > Although thalidomide was never approved for sale in the United States at the time, over 2.5 million tablets had been distributed to over 1,000 physicians during a clinical testing program. The Fine Article is talking about drug prices. The Thalidomide scandal in the USA was about a large clinical trial. The two are related, but different.
  • smnrchrds 8y ago
    "Worldwide, an estimated 24,000 babies were born with thalidomide-induced malformations. An additional 123,000 stillbirths and miscarriages were due to thalidomide, according to conservative estimates." [0] "New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage" [1] It's a balancing act. Bad drugs kill people. Unaffordable drugs kill people too. Is there any evidence that the balance FDA has chosen leads to less deaths than the balance EU regulators have chosen, or a third point entirely? [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/thalidomide-explainer-1.4434746 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/thalidomide-explainer-1.44347... [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
  • opo 8y ago
    I am pretty sure regulators in Europe do not use the same drug approval process that was used in the 1960s. For example: >...The Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) between FDA and European Union allows drug inspectors to rely upon information from drug inspections conducted within each other’s borders. https://www.fda.gov/internationalprograms/agreements/ucm598735.htm https://www.fda.gov/internationalprograms/agreements/ucm5987... Approving new drugs without adequate testing will cost lives, being over cautious can also cost lives though. An example of that was the FDA refusing to allow beta-blockers: >...For example, consider FDA’s incredibly long delay in approving beta-blockers to reduce the risk of second heart attacks. By the mid-1970s this had been documented in clinical trials, and a number of beta-blockers were approved for this use in Europe. But in the U.S., FDA imposed a moratorium on beta-blocker approvals due to the drugs’ carcinogenicity in animals. ... Finally, in 1981 FDA approved the first such drug, boasting that it might save up to 17,000 lives per year. That meant, of course, that as many as 100,000 people may have died waiting for FDA to act —an explosive point, but one that very few journalists pursued http://www.jpands.org/vol15no4/kazman.pdf http://www.jpands.org/vol15no4/kazman.pdf