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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.
-Cp said:Because we have no way to validate the quality of those drugs....
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 cant 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 theyre 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, Canadas 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....
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...
nateo said:Sorry
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.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...
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.
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 companiesdwarfed 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 monopoliesin 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 aggressivein 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 oppositeour publicly sponsored research enterprise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
:teeth:
As long as they get paid for it, I don't see why this would be an issue. Smartass. :spank3:
Said1 said:
