You're operating under a misconception. When Canadians come to the United States for care, the bills are paid by Canadian Medicare
Only with approval, which means often it is not.
On the subject of pharmaceutical companies, do you really believe that there wouldn't be enough profit in new drugs to motivate them to do research if people in the US weren't paying more than anybody else in the world?
The question makes it seem that its a binary thing, either you have enough money or you do not. It doesn't work that way, with no research until X profit is reached and then you get massive research. Its not a perfectly smooth curve either, but its much closer to that than simply "enough", or "not enough" in one step. The more profitable researching, developing, testing, and paying the other start up costs for new drugs is, the more drug development you will get. If you significantly reduce the profitability, than you will reduce the development by a significant (but impossible to precisely determine) amount.
Of course that argument could be used for all sorts of additional interventions to make drug HIGHER price, and the drug industry more profitable, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense either. More profit equals more effort to develop, but obviously we don't want to turn our entire economy over to developing drugs. I don't have any specific target about what's enough, but for in order to avoid reducing the development from what we have now, and for other reasons, I would tend to be against intervention to lower the profitability of the drug industry.
Do you really think it makes sense for the US to be the only country in the world where people pay the ridiculous prices we pay?
What would make sense is for the other countries acting as partial free riders, to pay more of their share. That might reduce costs for us and at the same time result in more development. But I don't think its going to happen. |
