Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD
1 month ago
Eh, as an American I have to pay Visa/Mastercard fees too.
Why do European drug firms charge so much more for their drugs in the US than in Europe? That is an actual difference between what it is like to be in a consumer in US vs Europe. Even Bernie Sanders thinks it is a problem: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5123689/novo-nordisk-ce...
Many European countries have a single payer system when it comes to the medical system. That gives them a big leverage in negotiations for drug pricing.
When European customers pay American firms, it's "protection money".
When American customers pay European firms, it's just capitalism, sorry bro.
You’re twisting words at this point. Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly and neither of them are afraid to use their power to cut off money flows towards entities they disapprove of. It’s an intrinsic risk and a big issue for sovereignty. The situation is very different for pharmaceuticals, a lot of which are American. The short story is, the American healthcare system is broken and very expensive for the results it provides. The solution is to reform your health system. Moaning won’t solve anything because even if you replaced all those evil European companies with American alternatives, it won’t bring prices down because the system still encourages price gouging.
You’d have a point if you had examples of European pharma companies cutting off supply to American entities for political reasons. You don’t, so you don’t have a point.
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For pharma there are, most of the time, alternatives. There is no alternative to Visa/Mastercard in Europe. It's an American duopoly.
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That comparison makes no sense at all. What protection money are you taking about?
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AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying workers less in jurisdictions where they can't unionize and strike.
That actually changed recently, but The Economist (UK newspaper) whines that Americans will no longer be footing the bill for drug development:
https://archive.is/bWwP4
We're done with Europeans treating us as suckers. Doing nice things for Europe leads to nothing but contempt from Europeans.
They correctly point out that useless parasites like the Pharmacy Benefit Managers that I also mentioned to you, are a quite big part of your drug price problem. Yet you seem to refuse to acknowledge it
The system is packed with opaque middlemen such as pharmacy benefit managers, many of which are making big rents
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No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedical research says that its just a common misconception that R&D costs drive drug prices eg. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-071710
How is that relevant? The US can reform its healthcare system whenever it decides to do so.
For the EU, Visa and Mastercard dependence form a duopoly controlled by a hostile foreign power. An alternative is essential.
While Master Card and a Visa there is a EU regulation limiting the fees, health insurance is mainly national level. So you could ask the question why is Ozempic cheap in Australia? But I can't answer your question.
This website appears to indicate that Visa/Mastercard fees are about 6x as high in the US vs EU:
https://wallethub.com/edu/credit-card-interchange-fees-by-co...
The EU had such a good deal with the US. But they couldn't resist making fun of us. They made fun of us for our military spending while we deterred Russia. They made fun of us for our health spending while we subsidized their drug development costs. They made fun of our long work hours, while demanding Ukraine contributions based on our high GDP (which is high in part because we work long hours). They talk so much about America's soft power in Europe, without realizing that Europe's soft power in America is practically all gone at this point.
Okay, so you're mad that your country is too stupid to regulate it's own business?
The regulation also forced all merchants to accept Visa/MC without being able to surcharge a fee for it.
Both Companies are quite happy with that deal as it boasted the adoption for their cards across Europe
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You are paying more for everything because your country is extremely anti social, people alone have no leverage to negotiate prices with visa, pharmaceutics and so on.
Trump is only pushing that « free for all » policy even more, I wouldn’t expect to see things improve for you.
Instead of fixing your country and making the rich accountable, you’re being manipulated to look elsewhere.
Anyway, I believe that the eu cutting ties with the USA is the best thing that could happen to us and I’m glad you’re satisfied. We should have spent much more on military and put an end to the USA military supremacy across the world a long time ago.
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> The EU had such a good deal with the US.
There are regulations. Both Visa and Mastercard were happy with those and made quite a lot of money from their business in the EU. They absorbed and merged with local alternatives and competitors. It’s a bit rich to complain after the game has been going on for a while that the rules are as they are: they’ve always been that way and if they were not happy, they could just have ignored the European markets. Now, if your point is that you’re being shafted, then congratulations: realising is the first step towards solving. Now, vote for a government that will actually regulate the sector in the people’s favour, not the big corps. We cannot help you for that.
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And the fees you pay go, in part, to fund the American War machine that is now threatening Europe. As a European, I don't want to fund your war machine.
You know that nearly nobody in the US pays the sticker price of Drugs?
They have to put an absurd sticker price on the drugs so that the "Pharmacy Benefit Manager" (an useless middlemen that only exists in US Healthcare) can "negotiate" a "discount" on behalf of your insurance (aka the real price), for which he takes a cut based on how big the "discount" is