I fail to see how congress' efforts would do anything but increase prices.
I don't see this as a problem. Even if I were to stipulate that all other first world countries have processes equal in safety requirements to that of the FDA, I still wouldn't see this as a problem. In a scenario without this, pharmaceutical companies would be able to pressure multiple government agencies until it found one willing to reduce its safety requirements. Then they could push all their drugs through that agency, making an end run around the more stringent requirements of the FDA.
I've looked into this. The sunscreens available in Europe are not necessarily better than the ones available in the US. For some people (like me), many of them are strictly worse - it depends on your skin type.
But as for FDA approval, the relevant part of this thread, it's not clear that those should be approved in the US. A number of them have been found to be excreted in breast milk, which the FDA has specifically cited as an issue for approving them, and that is indeed a real problem.
It's sort of hard to fathom writing "despite Congress" in a headline like this.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-myth-of-drug-expirati...
This continues to be one of the dumbest arguments on this topic. If you want the local price to change, change the intellectual property law that inflates their price in the first place, dont repeal bans that circumvent the intellectual property laws.
The question is more like "if Disney sets avengers to $3 per view in American and $1 in Canada, is it legal to use a VPN to appear Canadian, and pay the Canadian licensing price." If the answer is yes, then why not just let American's pay the Canadian price vs the ruse of streaming the data from another country and pretending the transaction is hunky dory. If impersonating a Canadian to watch Avengers is intellectual property infringement, underpaying the license in your country, the same logic should apply to other intellectual property.
This thread is talking about reimportation of brand-name pharmaceuticals. In many of these cases, it's the same manufacturer producing the same physical goods at the same factory and selling them for two different prices on different sides of the border.
This is not an "intellectual property" issue; it's a trade issue.
Why do you have "ip" in quotes, its literally the single most important thing in this conversation. Trade is a way to circumvent the pricing set, it doesn't address the underlying exclusivity.
The exclusivity isn't what lets them maintain different prices in different countries, which is the problem at hand. Those different prices are only feasible because of artificial trade barriers, as evidenced by the fact that these price differences also occur with generic medications, which are not subject to exclusivity protections.
> Why do you have "ip" in quotes, its literally the single most important thing in this conversation.
Because "intellectual property" is a highly controversial term which conflates three complete unrelated categories of law that each have different origins and underlying justifications.
The ban doesn't circumvent "intellectual property" laws; the ban is what allows enables those laws to be effective at raising prices (which is the entire goal) in the first place.
Reimporting prescription drugs from other OECD countries would be the closest thing we have to a silver bullet for prescription drug pricing problems in the US. (That's not the only problem, but it's a massive one).
> Why would we waste the money importing them when we can just change our intellectual property laws to match their prices.
You're missing the point. Nobody would import anything. The price differences on either side of the border only exist because of the artificial barrier to trade. Allowing drug imports from other countries establishes an upper bound on how much the manufacturers can charge for those same drugs in the US.
This (and the Cuba travel ban as another example) seems outright "unamerican" to me. Where is the land of the free and the brave and personal responsibility?
With zero frictions between the cross-border trade in prescription drugs, a drug manufacturer would have to set a uniform worldwide price for their drugs. Otherwise if they sold to France cheaper than they sold to the US, then US consumers would simply import the drugs from French vendors instead of paying the US list price.
> In the US, we have a ban on re-importing cheaper drugs which our companies produce
> We do not admit competitive medications from other first world countries without full FDA approval.
This second sentence doesn't refer to the first sentence. But a separate practice of requiring full FDA approval for a drug like Tianeptine which has a long history of being an antidepressant in Europe.
But to the point that you made I think it's fair to argue that when you have a monopolistic seller having oligopsonistic buyers is probably closer to a competitive market than just a monopolistic seller.
Besides, steel tariffs just hand the global steel market to china and push companies that use steel out of the US. We should be taking advantage of cheap steel but instead we've decided to hurt every US company that uses steel.
But when governments do it to pharmaceuticals, that's totally harmless and has zero downsides beyond reducing some rich guy's mega-profits somewhere.
That the government doesn't directly negotiate prices there is technically true and sort of beside the point.
Private insurers are free to negotiate prices for Part D drugs on behalf of Medicare, which they do quite aggressively.
Thalidomide. You lose.
"New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage" [1]
It's a balancing act. Bad drugs kill people. Unaffordable drugs kill people too. Is there any evidence that the balance FDA has chosen leads to less deaths than the balance EU regulators have chosen, or a third point entirely?
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/thalidomide-explainer-1.44347...
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
> In the United States, Food & Drug Agency pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey M.D. withstood pressure from the Richardson-Merrell Pharmaceuticals Co. and refused [FDA] approval to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed.
and
> Although thalidomide was never approved for sale in the United States at the time, over 2.5 million tablets had been distributed to over 1,000 physicians during a clinical testing program.
The Fine Article is talking about drug prices. The Thalidomide scandal in the USA was about a large clinical trial. The two are related, but different.
>...The Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) between FDA and European Union allows drug inspectors to rely upon information from drug inspections conducted within each other’s borders.
https://www.fda.gov/internationalprograms/agreements/ucm5987...
Approving new drugs without adequate testing will cost lives, being over cautious can also cost lives though. An example of that was the FDA refusing to allow beta-blockers:
>...For example, consider FDA’s incredibly long delay in approving beta-blockers to reduce the risk of second heart attacks. By the mid-1970s this had been documented in clinical trials, and a number of beta-blockers were approved for this use in Europe. But in the U.S., FDA imposed a moratorium on beta-blocker approvals due to the drugs’ carcinogenicity in animals. ... Finally, in 1981 FDA approved the first such drug, boasting that it might save up to 17,000 lives per year. That meant, of course, that as many as 100,000 people may have died waiting for FDA to act —an explosive point, but one that very few journalists pursued