In the industrialized countries with single payer the costs are between 25% and 50% lower
And those countries are very different than the US in many ways. They generally have less wealth and lower income per person, they mostly a lesser degree of malpractice claims, and lower awards, they have lower salaries for doctors, lower costs for medical education and on the average, at the margin, they make less aggressive/expensive attempts to prevent death when its very unlikely that the patient will live, particularly for very old patients, and other differences great and small, general and specific to the medical care system.
re: Countries with such controls can rely on American money to underwrite developing new drugs, but if we add them there isn't another America waiting in the wings to pay for all the drug development.
For someone that is against nearly all US government subsidies, you are remarkably generous with subsidizing the entire world.
The US government isn't providing the subsidy. Foreign governments are taking it from the drug companies. I'm against that subsidy (or "effective subsidy", because its not a straight cash payout to anyone), but to get rid of it you have to change the rules in other countries. What your asking for is trying to get the US to provide the same subsidy for drug users at the expense of drug companies. Such a change would probably have some unfortunate side-effects. It could be argued that it would be a net short run advantage for American drug consumers, as drug prices come down, but in the long run or even perhaps the medium run, reduced incentive, and reduced resources for drug development will make things worse then they other wise would have been.
I suppose you could counter this to an extent by reducing government imposed costs on drug research, but I don't think you would want to reduce the amount of trial required or otherwise deregulate the drug safety and efficacy regime we have in place.
Besides, it's a separate issue.
Its an issue worth discussing separately, but it also directly connects to your point about other countries paying less. One of the reason they pay less is that they force drug companies to charge less. |
