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So it should cost $550 in America and $550 in Canada.
by deadbabe 1y ago
So it should cost $550 in America and $550 in Canada.
- tptacek 1y agoIt depends on your moral system. Equalizing costs across markets almost certainly reduces the number of people who can be served by a medication.
- cpfohl 1y agoI'd be really interested to see these costs averaged (like parent post) but then re-distributed by average income...
- deadbabe 1y agoUm it also increases the number of Americans who can now access those drugs? So whose healthcare is more important to you?
- tptacek 1y agoIt decreases the total number of people with access. Like I said: it depends on your moral system.
- deadbabe 1y agoThe people paying the most in healthcare costs should be getting priority to treatments and medicine don’t you think? Isn’t that fair? If you are getting cheap healthcare because these people are basically subsidizing it for you, and they’re not even getting anything, then you’re the leech. These people laughing at Americans having to go bankrupt to afford $1000 medicine that they only have to pay $10 for in their country: fuck em. How I wish we could distribute the costs evenly…
- tptacek 1y agoDepends on your moral system.
- testing22321 1y agoHow do you know what their profit margins are in each country? How much profit is enough?
- megaman821 1y agoSince most non-biological medicines don't cost very much to manufacture at all; enough profit is enough to cover that drug's R&D and the R&D of the 9 other drugs that didn't pan out. If the US market can cover all those costs, then whatever you get out of other countries is gravy. If that ceases to be true, then other countries will have to pony up more money or go without.
- bradfa 1y agoPopulation of the USA is about 340 million, population of Canada is about 42 million. Assuming similar statistics of people needing a given medicine, proper cost sharing to result in the same profits would put it much closer to the USA cost than the Canada cost.
- sfn42 1y agoYeah man that's what they do. They sell it at a loss in Canada and then profit in the US to make up the loss. That's definitely how it works. Let's hope they never discover that they could just not sell it in Canada at all and make even more money.
- munk-a 1y agoI'm not certain if there's a specific example you have in mind but as a Canadian familiar with the pharma market you can rest assured that Canada (sometimes through the hidden mechanism of government subsidies) pays well above cost for every medication and medical device I'm familiar with. Sure, companies are gouging the US worse - but they still make a tidy profit in the Canadian market.
- goobatrooba 1y agoThis theory that American prices subsidise the rest of the world has really caught on in the US but I have never seen any evidence for it. Most common drugs are out of patent anyway, so there should be no barrier to low cost production anywhere. Moreover the EU and China give huge funding to basic and specific research, which forms the basis of many drugs. For instance the RNA research that gave us COVID vaccines was completely European from start to finish, only production then involved American companies due to scale benefits and market access. On the contrary where the evidence is obvious is that the US pharma companies have amazing profits (such as the few Europeans that sell at scale in the US). My personal, unscientific, take is that the entire narrative that the US prices fund global low prices is completely unfounded and just an attempt by big pharma to get the US government on their side to break fair pricing mechanisms in other countries.
- bigyabai 1y agoThis is flamebait. Nobody with a cursory understanding of a market economy thinks in these terms.