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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (131053)	1/30/2001 10:46:21 AM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 1571939

Tim, I think the concern is not that a French drug sells for more in the US because of the distributor, but that the US drug companies cut deals with foreign countries that run their socialized medicine, and force a low price on the drug company. The US company is assured of the return on their R&D investment from unregulated sales in the use, so it sells the drug for a fraction of the US price to the foreign government. If the company, by doing this was forced to cut the US prices as well, they would not have offered a cut price deal to foreign customers. The company would have to calculate by how much they can cut the price to get the deal, while realising that their US prices would fall by the same amount. Anyway, the effect of this would be either lower prices of drugs in the US, or foreign customers paying the same price as the US customers. I am not saying I am advocating this, but that's the theory behind this. I know it has million tiny problems in the fine print, as most of the regulations do. If you think about it, it is not as bad as you think. It's kind of like applying free trade to markets that have been sheltered from free trade. Drugs (medical) are not freely tradable item. A consumer or a distributor can't just buy on the foreign market and import stuff here. People will buy gray market Sony Walkman, but not drugs. The distributor would be subject to crippling lawsuits if he tried to sell grey market drugs. Joe