Portside - In response to this week’s launch of a new program letting Medicare negotiate lower prices for a handful of medicines, drugmakers are insisting the initiative will limit patients’ access to medicine and stifle the development of new cures. However, all 10 of the drugs up for negotiation are already being sold in other countries at fractions of what pharmaceutical companies are charging for them in the United States, according to a Lever review — and drugmakers are reporting huge revenues from those foreign sales.
In some cases, Americans — whose tax money subsidizes the development of virtually all medicines approved for sale in the U.S. — are being charged 1,000 percent more than foreign patients for the same drugs. Drugmakers have filed multiple lawsuits to try to block the new Medicare negotiation program, claiming that price reductions will harm American patients. However, some of those same companies recently raked in upwards of $4 billion in revenue last quarter selling six of the targeted pharmaceutical products in foreign countries at lower world-market prices. That’s more than $47 million per day — or $2 million an hour.
1 comment:
Either lower the price or pay the American government and people royalties for all the research our tax dollars support.
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