DagT wrote: > Den 10. jan. 2007 kl. 15.54 skrev Adam Maas: > >> David Savage wrote: >>> On 1/10/07, William Robb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> Interestingly, the Americans seem to be flocking to Canadian >>>> pharmacies to >>>> take advantage of our much lower drug costs. >>> Does the Canadian government subsidise drug's like they do in Oz? >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> Dave >>> >> Yes, to an extent. More a case of regulated pricing. >> >> -Adam > > I think what happens is that most countries, but not the US, allow > other companies to make patented drugs if the patent owner rises the > price too much. > > DagT
The issue is that these drugs cost billions to develop and certify. If it wasn't for the fact that the US has an unregulated market for pricing, and is such a major market most drug companies could not afford to invest in drug development as they cannot recoup their development costs during the patent period. The cost already steers them into concentrating on high-risk/high-payoff development. There's no money in the cure for the common cold, but a cure for cancer?. Too many people look at the marginal production cost of the pills and say the drug companies are ripping us off, not remembering the billions the first production pill costs these companies, and the incredible mass of regulations that they work under (which protects us, but significantly raises the development cost and timelines for these drugs). -Adam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
