I don't have confidence that the Trump administration will pull this off, because I watched the George W Bush administration punt it in 2002: https://www.nytim

I don't have confidence that the Trump administration will pull this off, because I watched the George W Bush administration punt it in 2002: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/18/us/plan-import-drugs-canada-passes-senate-but-bush-declines-carry-it.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/18/us/plan-import-drugs-cana... The real reason that prescription drug prices in the US don't match the prices seen in other countries is that patients in the US have no leverage in demand like that seen in supply. When a market has a power imbalance where the producer has a near-infinite production capacity (drugs cost infinitely less to manufacture than discover) and monopoly protections (pharmaceutical patents), then the consumer is at the whim of the producer and will eventually/inevitably pay whatever price the producer demands. This is econ 101 stuff. What we need is an advocate to organize consumers so they have leverage over producers and can set a bulk price. This would also work in any industry that has a natural monopoly like water, electricity or (gasp) telecommunications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly Note that we aren't talking about why electricity costs $10 per kilowatt hour, because decades ago we didn't have the "government is bad" mentality introduced by the Reagan administration, so Carter was able to form the US Department of Energy (and really various energy commissions had made the electrical grid part of the commons decades before that). So this proposal of importing prescription drugs (whether it happens or not) is only looking at the supply side, and for the reasons I listed above, will certainly fail eventually. The reason the rest of the world is eating our lunch is that they have no qualms about bolstering the demand side. That may mean: using a single-payer system instead of insurance companies, limiting the prices of key drugs, regulating pharmaceutical companies at a deeper level than what is done in the US, producing drugs at the state level (whether they're patented or not), or some combination of these and other measures that put consumers on an even playing field with producers. Now, we could look at US insurance companies as being an advocate to keep drug prices down. But someone realized decades ago (indeed, as early as Nixon's Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973), that a pool of money that large is ripe for exploitation and corruption. It was predicted very early on by (labor/leftists/Keynesians/socialists/radicals/insert boogeymen here) that we would find ourselves in the situation we're in now. It's just that wealth inequality wasn't at nearly the levels we see today, and older folks from the WWII generation felt a certain patriotic duty to rip off the rest of the world instead of their fellow Americans, and we still had a manufacturing base in the US so we didn't fall into these zero-sum games of squeezing profit from stone. Ok that last paragraph was fairly opinionated on my part. But as the influencers of the tech world, you owe it to yourselves to be informed and know the history of this stuff so that you don't get distracted by the dilluted messaging that keeps people ignorant and divided. Stick to first principles, use critical thinking skills to discern where power imbalance leads to corruption, and find a way to convey what you have learned to people hungry for insight. For me that's the basic supply/demand dichotomy and how it breaks down in natural monopolies, but maybe there are better hacks out there.