More on Health Care: Today’s article by Steve Bailey captures the silliness of the Drugs-from-Canada solutions to rising medicine costs:
Politicians — Democrat and Republican, local and national — have latched on to the idea of buying Made-in-America drugs, via Canada, at half the price. But if this is good politics, it is not a healthcare policy, and that is something we desperately need. Problem one: Reimporting drugs from Canada in quantities isn’t going to work.
Say what you will about the drug companies, but the people who run them are not stupid. A few of us driving over the border to save money on our monthly prescriptions or using obscure websites hawking Lipitor at bargain-basement prices is one thing. But pharmaceutical companies are not going to ship huge quanities of drugs to Canada — or anywhere else — to have them shipped back at huge discounts. How long do you think it will take to turn off the faucet for distributors that are doing just that? Companies such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline already are doing it.
The missing bit in the public debate over this - though it’s obvious to politicians, presumably - is that drugs are cheaper in Canada than the US for a similar (not the same, but similar) reason that airplane seats are cheaper for leisure travelers than business travelers: price differentiation. Drug companies can provide cheaper drugs to Canada because it has already recouped costs and made profits in the US. I suspect that politicians (and the public’s) fondness for offering national health care solutions through some scheme of drug price control or reduction speaks to our inability to stomach political solutions that involve painful trade-offs. But as the 90s (with declining quality under HMOs) or the 2000s (with rising coverage premiums) show, trade-offs are made whether the politicians talk about them or not. Maybe it’s time we more actively decide which compromises we want to make.
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