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Politics : A US National Health Care System?

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To: TimF who wrote (4364)	2/8/2008 12:15:31 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Read Replies (3) of 42652

Foreign free riders and the high price of US medicines Introduction The United States government is engaged in a campaign to characterise other industrialised countries as free riding on high US pharmaceutical prices and innovation in new drugs.1 This campaign is based on the argument that lower prices imposed by price controls in other affluent countries do not pay for research and development costs, so that Americans have to pay the research costs through higher prices in order to keep supplying the world with new drugs.1 2 Supporters of the campaign have characterised the situation as a foreign rip-off.3 We can find no evidence to support these and related claims, and we present evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, we explain why the claims themselves contradict the economic nature of the pharmaceutical industry. Origins of the campaign The campaign, strongly backed by the pharmaceutical industry, seems to have started in the late 1990s as a response to a grass roots movement started by senior citizens against the high prices of essential prescription drugs.4 This issue was the most prominent one for both parties in the 2000 elections and has since been fuelled by a series of independent reports documenting that US drug prices are much higher than those in other affluent countries.5-7 The idea that other countries are exploiting the US has led to a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and was behind a Department of Commerce report that strongly advocated that other developed countries raise prices on patented medicines.8 But are higher prices really necessary? Read it all at: bmj.com Conclusions The pharmaceutical industry has provided invaluable medicines to cure and relieve millions of patients throughout the world. As an industry, it drives economic growth and employs thousands of skilled people. But it also uses false economics and makes up stories to justify higher prices. Higher prices strain budgets, causing millions of US patients not to take the drugs their doctors think necessary. The pharmaceutical industry and the US government want to blame other developed countries for these higher prices rather than make drugs more affordable.

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