And I agree with the argument that Republicans don’t need cover for their actions. And I see a fundamental difference between following the will of the people and holding people to their promises versus ignoring the will of the people and trying to prevent those promises.
And I especially see a difference from the guy who is actively sabotaging the US military to try and get them to undo a policy he doesn’t like. And he sure doesn’t think he needs any cover. He’s a Republican attacking the military, FFS.
You know, if i learned that high US drug prices subsidized cheaper drugs in Zambia, I’d be okay with that. But i don’t see why it’s a good thing that sick people in the US are subsidizing sick people in Canada, the UK, Japan, and other comparably wealthy nations. And we are, to a massive extent.
Also, i work for the insurance industry, and every several years i see charts of probability by industry. We’re always at the bottom. And the pharmaceutical industry is always at the top. They’ve invested heavily in buying US congressmen, and it’s paid off handsomely for them.
Americans often don’t realize just how wealthy they are compared to the rest of the world. Japan’s GDP per capita is less than half that of America. American GDP per capita is 80,034. Canada is $52,722. The UK, $46,341. Japan, $35,385.
Progressive pricing should see Americans pay the most for medicine by a substantial amount, then Canada, the UK and Japan in order.
Canada is more left wing than the US. It has about 1/9 the population, and Canadian insurance companies are allowed to negotiate with pharma companies. Given they are more left wing, I imagine Canadians are even MORE about helping the poor and distributing wealth, so they should want to pay 9 times what the companies are asking for, in order to put them on a par with the US. Remember, it’s not a subsidy, it’s price discrimination! It’s only logic!
Allowing price negotiation is not banning price discrimination. Your Lexus/Toyota analogy totally fails, because they pharma companies are selling the same product, but one buyer is allowed to negotiate and one isn’t.
I’ve said nothing about drug reimportation, I’ve only talked about giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prices.
Your answers sort of side-swipe a response to my post, and then add a few paragraphs of what looks like text supplied by a right-wing chatbot. You’re clearly wrong about what “the left” wants, since Bernie Sanders disagrees with you and he’s very lefty.
And, you’re hijacking this thread with strawmen about what the left wants, rather than addressing the question about whether Sanders is doing this the right way. Go ahead and get the last word in, this is too exhausting for me.
Sorry, this looks like junior modding. It’s not my place to make this call. I don’t have much more to add to this thread, so I’ll restate my position and flounce.
I agree with Sanders that the US should be allowed to negotiate with pharma companies for drugs that they purchase. I don’t know enough about reimportation or his other goals to have an intelligent debate about it. I suppose allowing reimportation would give the US a stronger bargaining position, if nothing else, but that’s all I’ll say on a subject I don’t know much about.
This is true, of course, but I still don’t think a single senator should be able to gum up the executive branch works. I agree that what he’s doing (holding back an appointment of an NIH director or whatever) is not as bad as holding back all promotions or threatening the US credit rating, but I still disagree with this method of getting his way.
Average GDP is totally irrelevant to this discussion. What’s median income? Well, okay, it’s actually very hard to find numbers on the same basis from country to country. Here are some stats i could dig up:
It doesn’t really matter that Bill Gates can buy a lot of insulin without noticing the cash expenditure.
These numbers don’t scream to me that it’s reasonable for US patients to pay 2 or 100 times what Canadians do. (The two is rounded from the cost of humira, above. The one hundred is how much my mom’s steroid medication cost increased when the drug was approved in the US and she had to buy it in the US, when she’d been previously buying it from a Canadian pharmacy.)
It is my understanding that Senator Sanders is not talking about the U.S. purchasing drugs or renegotiating drug pricing at all. This is not Medicare negotiating prices for part D. Rather, he wants the National Institute of Health to start adding strings to future biomedical research collaborations, specifically exclusive licenses of federally-owned (or co-developed) patents to private corporations.
The proposed policy was in effect during part of the '90s, but it was revoked, ostensibly because it clashed with NIH’s primary research mission and its statutory mission “to transfer promising technologies to the private sector for commercialization”. The NIH said at the time that putting a reasonable pricing clause in its license agreements scared away private partnerships.