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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

My siblings and I take a pill 3x day for life for a genetic condition. The pill(colchicine) cost pennies in its generic form. It isn't a pill that was made in a lab after millions in research. So there were plenty of generic brands available and it'd cost us 5 bucks/mo from Walmart.

That was that.

Last year a company came in and got an exclusive on it on the premise that they spent millions in testing the pill for quality etc. Armed with the exclusive, they killed all generic brands and are selling the same pill for $5/pill.

What cost me $5/mo previously now costs $450/mo.

There is something seriously flawed about some things in our healthcare system.

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If you don't value the testing Colcrys did (I probably wouldn't, colchicine's been around long enough), consider getting it from a "Canadian" pharmacy online. Generics of otherwise patented/exclusive drugs in the US are frequently legal in other countries. I know of a number of people who order from an online "Canadian" pharmacy for a generic version of Singulair, which is produced in India.

The legality of importing these for personal use is pretty murky. The FDA probably wouldn't like it, but it's not a blatant violation of any laws I'm aware of either.

More generally, I really struggle with patent protections for pharmaceuticals. It's difficult to imagine how they'd justify paying ginormous amounts of money to develop and/or test products to the FDA's standards without patent protection, but I find the idea of patents pricing people out of medication distasteful.

This is the FDA's fault.

Without the FDA, you would keep buying the generic you had been buying, and the company would keep making it for you. But with the FDA, a company can come in and essentially buy a monopoly on a market that would otherwise be free.

It sounds like you're saying "government is the problem". But nearly every other developed country doesn't have this problem.

Please, explain why government is the reason for why the US healthcare system is so much poorer than the healthcare system of countries in which there is far more government involvement.

Other countries show us that solution to bad government isn't the elimination of government. The solution is to fix what we've got.

Is the solution really FDA or no FDA? Without knowing a lot, I doesn't seem too hard to cite goods that have come from the FDA.

Last year a company came in and got an exclusive on it... There is something seriously flawed about some things in our healthcare system.

That doesn't sound like a healthcare problem. That sounds like an IP problem.

Whatever it was that let the new manufacturer take the compound out of the public domain is where you should be directing your ire. Sounds like another indictment of patent law.

Stringent FDA requirements that require extremely expensive testing are basically a health care problem. The fact that we have to give people monopolies so they can afford to do what the FDA wants is an unfortunate symptom of the problem.

Semantics. Almost all problems related to healthcare have their root cause at something other than healthcare directly.

For example, defensive medicine can be traced to the way our legal system works.

It's a healthcare and ____ problem(insert IP, legal etc.)

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