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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fresc who wrote (236)	1/17/2005 11:50:26 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

>> You think if they did not make money they would sell to Canada? "Make money" means different things to different people. I recommend you take a couple of courses in (a) Cost Accounting and (b) Managerial Accounting. What you'll see is that "Big US Pharma" would be motivated to sell Canadians drugs for ANYTHING over the variable production & distribution costs -- Americans are paying the R&D costs, so anything they can collect beyond the cost of stamping out capsules and distributing them is gravy. That, and that alone, explains why "Big US Pharma" can "make money" selling medications to Canadians on the cheap -- because WE have the burden of paying the R&D costs.

To: fresc who wrote (236)	1/17/2005 7:27:51 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

The fact that Big Pharma chooses to sell to Canada is only because they make money off us. They make enough to cover the R&D and other overhead costs with their sales in the US. As long as they make more than their marginal costs for each sale in Canada they come out ahead by selling in Canada. So cut the crap with the Research line No crap at all. If you limit prices you get less of something. If you limit the prices paid for drugs you get less new types of drugs. Its possible that shorter patent terms might make sense. A patent is after all a legal monopoly and generally we are better off without monopolies. However since research of new drugs is expensive, and risky (in the sense that many new drugs don't work or get approved, and to a lesser extent in the sense that the maker of the drugs can get sued), you won't get a lot of investment in this area without a decent change of large profits. The fact that big Pharma is making ridiculous amounts of money from working Americans I understand generics and non-prescription drugs are priced very competitively in America. Its only prescription drugs still under patent that have very high prices. The economics of the drug market makes such prices understandable. If the patent periods where greatly reduced its possible that the prices for both patented drugs and drugs not under patent would go up, but the average price of drugs still go down. That might not make sense unless you remember that drugs under patent are more expensive then those not under patent and less drugs would be under patent if the patent term was shorter. If the overall price goes down a lot you probably will get less research. If it goes down just a little bit the effect might not be significant. Tim