Why Are The Republicans Opposing Drug Importation From Canada?

NATO AIR

Senior Member
Jun 25, 2004
4,275
285
48
USS Abraham Lincoln
i don't understand this at all. from a political standpoint, if i were a senior citizen forced to choose between food and medicine because i had to pay the high ass prices the pharmaceutical industry is gouging people for, i wouldn't be voting republican this year. the dems are overwhelmingly the ones trying to allow people to import drugs from canada. how does this help bush and the republicans stay in power? its only giving an unnecessary point to the dems.
 
NATO AIR said:
i don't understand this at all. from a political standpoint, if i were a senior citizen forced to choose between food and medicine because i had to pay the high ass prices the pharmaceutical industry is gouging people for, i wouldn't be voting republican this year. the dems are overwhelmingly the ones trying to allow people to import drugs from canada. how does this help bush and the republicans stay in power? its only giving an unnecessary point to the dems.

Because we have no way to validate the quality of those drugs....
 
-Cp said:
Because we have no way to validate the quality of those drugs....

true in some cases, but not in all

http://www4.fosters.com/april_2004/April_25/News/su_0425e.asp
North of the border

Robert Fraser, a member of the Manitoba Pharmaceutical Association, said Canadadrugs.com has over-the-counter drugs, brand names and generics, and can offer consumers savings of up to 50 percent. Everything Canadadrugs.com sells has been approved by the Health Canada, he said. It is also a Certified Canadian International Pharmacy and has been approved by the International Mail Order Pharmacy Accreditation Commission.

When it comes to brand name drugs like Lipitor, Levitra or Zantac, Fraser said many of them are manufactured by offshore companies not based in the United States or Canada.

The Lipitor or Celebrex one would buy from a Canadian Internet pharmacy is the same drug one would buy in the United States, Fraser said. The key difference is that the Canadian drugs are a lot less expensive.

For example, 30 tablets of 10mg Lipitor costs $88.09 at Walgreens in Rochester. From Canadadrugs.com, they could get three times as many tablets for $155.59. If they bought 30 capsules of Celebrex with a strength of 200 mg in New Hampshire cost $100.99. For $147.97, they could get three times as much of the medication from Canada.

It is no wonder that demand for Canadian prescription drugs is quickly outpacing supply, Fraser said.

"If Canada can’t meet the demand, the potential for more illicit drugs from off shore coming into the U.S. will grow and that is what the U.S. should think about," Fraser said.

People will continue to buy prescription drugs from wherever they can regardless if they are licensed or not, Fraser said.

"If they’re not prepared to drop prices in your country, this problem will not go away," Fraser said. "What is happening in your country is obscene."

(also from the same article, another way to validate)

Jirinna Vlk, a spokeswoman with Health Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’s capital, disagreed.

She said consumers should check for an eight-digit drug identification number printed on the label. She said people can also call the pharmaceutical regulatory body in the Canadian province where the Internet company claims to be based to check if they are legitimate.

"That is how you know the drugs have been approved by Health Canada," Vlk said. They can also ask the regulatory body if the Internet pharmacy is in good standing or has any complaints or legal action taken against it, she said.

Vlk said consumers can also see if an Internet pharmacy Web site is part of the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites program. VIPPS provides consumers valuable information about the credentials of online pharmacies. She said if the Web site displays a VIPPS logo with a link to the program, it should be a safe source for online prescription drugs
 
-Cp said:
Because we have no way to validate the quality of those drugs....

Health Canada would be a good place to start. If perscription drugs are approved here, they are probably safe, and have been validated through testing in Canada. Many of the drugs being imported by American's are the same drugs being sold in USA, only more expensive.


Edit* you posted while I was replying Nato.
 
the costs are lower is SOCIALIZED MEDICENE!!

Importing these subsidised drugs undermines US sales.. It's a stupid idea...

I wonder just REALLY how many seniors have to choose between drugs and food.. And the further question.. Why did these people not prepare for their elderly years.. Ya see a lot of it is personal action and responsiblilty...
 
phadras said:
the costs are lower is SOCIALIZED MEDICENE!!

Importing these subsidised drugs undermines US sales.. It's a stupid idea...

I wonder just REALLY how many seniors have to choose between drugs and food.. And the further question.. Why did these people not prepare for their elderly years.. Ya see a lot of it is personal action and responsiblilty...

There are unexpected costs, which no amount of financial planning can prepare you for. People don't PLAN to be chronically ill, no one is that organized. I can speak from experience, $1200 per month for meds alone can suck up your savings fast.

nateo said:

No prob Nato, you just got to it before I did.:)
 
Nato Air,

For me, its more a question of how such a plan (allowing the US to buy cheap drugs from Canada) would be able to continue in the long run, and the effect that such a plan would have on both countries.

The majority of pharmaceutical companies are owned/operated by people in the US. So Canada is, in effect, buying drugs from US companies, and getting discounts because the government buys HUGE amounts of medicines in bulk.

At this point in time, relatively few Americans head up to Canada to buy cheap drugs, so Canada has no problem selling some of their "extras" to Americans.

All of a sudden, buying drugs from Canada becomes legal...Americans FLOOD up to Canada to get their Viagra as cheaply as possible...suddenly Canada is noticing that there is a shortage and that CANADIANS might run out of the medicine....Canada is going to do one of three things:

1) Raise the price of medication for Americans (right back where we started, except we are paying Canada instead of the pharmaceutical company).

2) Forbid Americans from buying medicine from Canada (right back where we started, just in reverse).

3) Try to buy MORE medicine from the pharmaceutical companies at the cheap bulk price.

It certainly isn't going to raise taxes on Canadians in order to buy more medicine for Americans.

Ok..so now that that has happened we need to look at what has happened in America...

1) Pharmacies and the like in the US are having major trouble staying open since they can not stay competitive and since their customers can simply go online and order Canadian drugs...people lose jobs, business, money, livlihood...

2) Drug companies are losing massive amounts of money. (Great! They make too much...Right???) So they could do several things...a) they raise drug prices for Canada (sending us right back to where we were before) or b) they cut research

Research is ludicrously expensive. It takes years upon years upon years upon years to form a new medicine..and once you have a medicine, drug companies can expect several years being spent on tests and trying to get the drug FDA approved...all that time, there is no profit on what they are doing...simply the costs of doctors and scientists, labratories and experiments, test subjects and every other cost....and during that time, the only thing that have to pay for it is the profit made from the last drug they came out with...

So if you take away the PROFITS from that drug, sure...the pharmaceutical companies are going to tighten up...lower some salaries, etc. But they are also going to raise prices for EVERYONE (including Canada) and more frightening then that...they are going to cut back on research. So if you are happy with the drugs we have out now....and nothing new...then good...you could buy drugs from Canada until the companies raise the prices for them too.

You see, its not as simple as "they have it cheaper and I want it cheaper" there are long-term consequences to it that make buying drugs from Canada a bad and, in my opinion, ultimately futile idea.
 
phadras said:
the costs are lower is SOCIALIZED MEDICENE!!

Importing these subsidised drugs undermines US sales.. It's a stupid idea...

I wonder just REALLY how many seniors have to choose between drugs and food.. And the further question.. Why did these people not prepare for their elderly years.. Ya see a lot of it is personal action and responsiblilty...
undermines US sales? I can guarantee you that these pharmas would NOT be selling to canada, france, or any other socialized medical country if they were NOT still making a profit.
 
Many issues have plausible arguments on each side to defend except for this one in my opinion. The Republicans are just plain wrong here and are protecting the drug industry.

The drugs are from the SAME company and just sent to two different countries. It is the exact SAME pill.

But the industry is protected by the Administration because it won't allow us to buy drugs from Canada.

This to me is a prime example of the government failing in its duty to protect its citizens. It has blatantly given up our health for money.
 
Gem said:
You see, its not as simple as "they have it cheaper and I want it cheaper" there are long-term consequences to it that make buying drugs from Canada a bad and, in my opinion, ultimately futile idea.

Yes it is that simple. If importing persciption drugs is going to have such catastrophics effects, then it is up to your government to impose price restrictions on the same drugs in order to prevent this.
 
this tidbit from the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal Of Medicine

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.

Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,

If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?[4]
Third, the industry is hardly a model of American free enterprise. To be sure, it is free to decide which drugs to develop (me-too drugs instead of innovative ones, for instance), and it is free to price them as high as the traffic will bear, but it is utterly dependent on government-granted monopolies—in the form of patents and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved exclusive marketing rights. If it is not particularly innovative in discovering new drugs, it is highly innovative— and aggressive—in dreaming up ways to extend its monopoly rights.

And there is nothing peculiarly American about this industry. It is the very essence of a global enterprise. Roughly half of the largest drug companies are based in Europe. (The exact count shifts because of mergers.) In 2002, the top ten were the American companies Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Wyeth (formerly American Home Products); the British companies GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca; the Swiss companies Novartis and Roche; and the French company Aventis (which in 2004 merged with another French company, Sanafi Synthelabo, putting it in third place).[5] All are much alike in their operations. All price their drugs much higher here than in other markets.

Since the United States is the major profit center, it is simply good public relations for drug companies to pass themselves off as American, whether they are or not. It is true, however, that some of the European companies are now locating their R&D operations in the United States. They claim the reason for this is that we don't regulate prices, as does much of the rest of the world. But more likely it is that they want to feed on the unparalleled research output of American universities and the NIH. In other words, it's not private enterprise that draws them here but the very opposite—our publicly sponsored research enterprise.

I guess from this highly researched and thought out article that a slight loss of profits wouldn't exactly hurt the R&D of these companies that much
 
But it is NOT the governments job to IMPOSE price restrictions on drug companies that are not violating US laws or monopoly legislation....perhaps in a socialist state it is...but not in the US.

By regulating the prices so that they are as low as Canada you are a) creating a socialized medicine state (causing more headaches, as is evidenced in Canada and the UK) and lowering the amount of money drug companies make to put into profits and research.

This is evident in what we are seeing now with Hillary Clinton's "vaccination" plan.

She said, "everyone should have the flu shot...so everyone making the flu shot has to make it for this cheap price..." and she set the price.

And the majority of companies who were then making the flu vaccine stopped making it because they could not afford to make it for the price she mandated...

Then what happened?

The two or three companies that continued to make it couldn't keep up the supply and demand. And people died because there were not enough vaccines.
 
Said1 said:
Yes it is that simple. If importing persciption drugs is going to have such catastrophics effects, then it is up to your government to impose price restrictions on the same drugs in order to prevent this.


then you have government intruding on free market, which undermines the 'free' part. most americans, especially business owners, prefer the government NOT telling them how to price their products. customer flow and input, cost of business and supplies will determine that.

it's not the government's job to take care of you. If you are an adult, you can do it on your own. There is no excuse for being a leech.
 
By regulating the prices so that they are as low as Canada you are a) creating a socialized medicine state (causing more headaches, as is evidenced in Canada and the UK) and lowering the amount of money drug companies make to put into profits and research.

I will be the first one to agree there are serious problems with socialized heath care. And lets be clear on another point which is that lowering prices to reasonable levels does not mean it's practically free, only reasonable. If you feel Canadian prices are below reasonable and will ruin the profits meant for research, I think your over reacting.
Manufacturers would be screaming much louder if their profits were seriously impeded by Canadian on-line pharmacies.

I don't know how much on-line druggist charge for dispensing fees, but I would bet it's a lot less than your local pharmacy. Dispensing fees add another 20%+ to the total cost of your prescription depending on where you go. Just out of curiosity, how much does a bottle of amoxicillin go for at your local pharmacy? I really have no idea what the price differences are between Canada and US, just thought I'd ask.

This is evident in what we are seeing now with Hillary Clinton's "vaccination" plan.

She said, "everyone should have the flu shot...so everyone making the flu shot has to make it for this cheap price..." and she set the price.

And the majority of companies who were then making the flu vaccine stopped making it because they could not afford to make it for the price she mandated...

Then what happened?

The two or three companies that continued to make it couldn't keep up the supply and demand. And people died because there were not enough vaccines.

Again, prices do not have to be so low they are almost free, just reasonable (was this program subsidized by the gov?). If Drug manufacturers are not capable of doing this on their own, then how do you propose to solve this problem?
 
fuzzykitten99 said:
then you have government intruding on free market, which undermines the 'free' part. most americans, especially business owners, prefer the government NOT telling them how to price their products. customer flow and input, cost of business and supplies will determine that.

I'm fully aware of the evil's of socialism, I don't need a recap. I just happen to feel US drug manufacturers have gotten out of control with pricing, what do you think? Do you think prices are reasonable?

t's not the government's job to take care of you. If you are an adult, you can do it on your own. There is no excuse for being a leech.

Yeah. I'm aware of that.
 
Yeah the drug companies are out of hand a bit, but thats the risk of a free enterprise system. There are some who want their piece of the pie and those who want the whole thing thats just something we all have to live with unless people stop being greeding overnight. The fact is some people do need and DESERVE(i mean working people with jobs and families) help some times tho and some federal aid is not bad at all.
 
Said1 said:
Health Canada would be a good place to start. If perscription drugs are approved here, they are probably safe, and have been validated through testing in Canada. Many of the drugs being imported by American's are the same drugs being sold in USA, only more expensive.

Said1, I heard a rumor that American drug companies artificially suppress the prices of drugs in Canada. That's because they use Canadians as test subjects. It's cheaper than buying all those rats and fewer people get upset about it.

Would I lie?

:banana:

:teeth:
 
Merlin1047 said:
Said1, I heard a rumor that American drug companies artificially suppress the prices of drugs in Canada. That's because they use Canadians as test subjects. It's cheaper than buying all those rats and fewer people get upset about it.

Would I lie?

:banana:

:teeth:

:laugh: As long as they get paid for it, I don't see why this would be an issue. Smartass. :spank3:
 
Said1 said:
:laugh: As long as they get paid for it, I don't see why this would be an issue. Smartass. :spank3:

Sorry. Sometimes I just can't help myself. I think it's a congenital deficiency.
 

Forum List

Back
Top