Canada has price control of drugs. Drug manufacturing can’t increase the price of a drug unless there is a proportionate increase in benefit to the patient. That’s why epipens are 1/5 the price in Canada that they are in the US.
The argument that drug companies will do doing research and coming up with new drugs if they can’t make unlimited profit is ridiculous. They are greedy fucks and will take the lower profit to keep lining their pockets. Canada proves that.
That you can’t have price control and profits is a lie.
Canada also has patents ie. government enforced monopolies. Drugs are already a pretty screwed-up market.
Yes. Companies that invest in drugs development deserve to make a profit. Patents protect their investment for a limited amount of time. They should not be able to make unlimited amounts of profit forever. What the drug price controls in Canada do is prevent a company from making a cosmetic change, like adding another stripe to the capsule of Losec, calling is Prilosec, and jacking up the price or increasing by 10 fold the price of an Epipen because you made a minor change to the delivery system. If there isn’t a proportionate increase in benefit to the patient you can’t raise the price in Canada.
How much drug research comes from Canada?
$16 billion per year.
That’s not the point, though, of course. The point is that US pharmaceutical companies sell their drugs into Canada at 1/4 to 1/10 the price because they still make profit and having $100 in your pocket instead of $1,000 is better than having $0 in your pocket.
It is the point, Canada can rely on the US to subsidize R&D costs. The cost to manufacture does not cover all costs of a drug, or the costs of drugs which were ineffective.
I’m not sure that you said what you intended to say. Do you want to revisit it before I respond?
The only thing I could clarify further is that the cost to research drugs later found to be ineffective has to made up in the costs of drugs that do get approved.
Ok…I wasn’t sure that the point about the cost to manufacture drugs was what you actually meant to say.
Pharmaceutical companies make massive profits. What that means is that after all of the money they spend on all of the things you’re referring to they still make massive profit. I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t make profit but that that profit should not be unlimited. The American healthcare system if grotesque. It is unique in the highly developed world in that grotesqueness. They wouldn’t sell Epipens in Canada for 20% of what they sell them for in the US if they weren’t making a profit on them. And, to be clear, Epipens contain epinephrine the wholesale cost of which is $5/mg and an Epipen delivers 0.3 mg which means that the drug in the Epipen costs around $1.50 wholesale. Is the little plastic pen with the spring in it worth $600? I don’t think so. I don’t even think that it’s worth the $150 you pay in Canada. You can have a pharmacist load a syringe for you for $15.
Profit margins for pharmaceutical companies are typically between 10 and 20 percent in the US, 2020 & 2021 are exceptions as the covid shot boosted numbers considerably. Those are normal profit margins for industry.
