Comment by KumaBear
4 hours ago
Why does the US consumer of said medications subsidize many other countries who have access to the same medications for a fraction of the US sticker price?
4 hours ago
Why does the US consumer of said medications subsidize many other countries who have access to the same medications for a fraction of the US sticker price?
Lots of reasons. One of them is that other countries negotiate deals country wide and can get bulk discounts. The US does this with the VA and Medicare, and people using those services generally pay less than the rest of Americans. In the end, it is largely a policy choice, as having a single payer could get better negotiated deals on drugs.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/how-medicare-negot...
Bah! Begone with your socialist mumbo jumbo! Fox News Entertainent channel tells me about you communist and your “single payer” sham all the time! We have the best healthcare! Merica!
This is satire btw.
"If Canada is getting a 30% discount we can make it up by baking it into the hundreds of smaller negotiations with American providers."
Drug maker thinking
Do you believe that the deals they make are unprofitable given the discount? Do you think the other countries are keeping guns to their heads or what? The discounts are there because they can be, not because other countries want to pay below the break-even price. It is in the US where the drug companies can invest in the government just enough to recoup that with massive premiums in the convoluted medical system.
Nobody's forcing US pharama companies to sell to those countries at those prices, they choose to, because it makes them more money.
Foreigners aren't the reason American healthcare sucks. Stop looking for people to blame abroad, all the sources of your problems are in the presidency, congress, and in the boardroom that directs the former.
Americans really love to tell themselves they are paying for others. You victimize yourselves, and then blame externalities. Fix you own issues.
This is not like IT where the Americans are completely dominant and clearly superior.
The European pharma companies are doing more than fine, despite their main market being heavily regulated and price-controlled.
The less charitable explanation is that US companies want to charge outrageous prices, and the American system let them to, so they do it.
That's what the USA are: a machine to prioritize profits over people. Sometimes it turns out fine, like for the startup scene. Sometimes it's terrible, like when lives at stake.
Other explanations sound like heavy copium to me.
Many of those European pharma companies do most of their work and make most of their money in the US.
While it's true that the exposure of top European firms can be often 50%+ of total revenue from U.S, that:
- Doesn't make them non viable without the American market, just less rich.
- Doesn't reflect the 5 to 10 times higher price Americans pay for the same drugs.
You can have a healthy industries with plenty of billions to be around and have decently priced drugs.
What you get in the US is uber profitable industries and people scrapping around.
Those European companies make most their profit in the US. They would be much smaller without access to the US market.
Maybe drugs, or these drugs, aren't the most efficient solutions. Shouldn't we direct resources toward more efficient ones?
4 replies →
Because US voters prefer the free market as opposed to government regulation and nationalized healthcare.
It is certainly a market, but I wouldn’t call it a free market.
Healthcare, like real estate, is a dysfunctional marketplace lacking real competition
I'm assuming you're European and just want to make an "America bad" post because this is comically ignorant. There wouldn't be mountains of federal code to adhere to if that was the case.
This is a trope among populists: pass legislation around <thing>, observe consequences of doing so, blame the "free market", repeat.
What other countries could teach the U.S. about bringing down drug prices
A look at how European governments negotiate with pharma companies helps explain why Americans pay more for prescription drugs.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/11/what-other-countri...
1 reply →
US voters have no principles. Even republicans started artistically screaming about nationalizing companies when they didn’t want to play ball with the president.
Can you provide evidence for the claim? Polling from pew and Gallup suggest this isn't the case.
I think surveys show voters prefer the opposite, but certain powers are able to overcome that.
If you pitched a pharma company with the thesis of "We'll charge US customers less and global customers more", what would stop that from working?
I can think of a number of things.