Comment by pixodaros
1 month ago
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
Certainly the US healthcare system needs reform. But I believe a big reason why we have paid such high drug prices for so long is because congresspeople in the US believed that it was good for us to subsidize drug innovation for the entire world. That era is over. Like I said, you Europeans had a good thing going, but you just couldn't let well enough alone.
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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