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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Are there telemedicine laws that prevent doctors from prescribing drugs to people in other countries? If not - this seems like an opportunity.

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The thing is, at that price, even without telemedicine, it's still profitable and in the process you've awarded yourself a small vacation to Paris.

This only works if you were already in a financial position to take a small vacation to Paris. If the medicine was sold for $5 in the US, it would have a much larger reach.

Sure, that was just to show how absurdly costly medical treatment has become in the U.S.

Not so long ago I had seen a documentary about how American diabetics couldn't afford insulin and had to purchase their insulin pens in Canada. It's quite a shame for a first-world country with one of the highest per-capita income to have people give up healthcare because it's simply too expensive

This exact argument has seemingly done absolutely nothing to sway politicians here. Because they do not have any shame whatsoever.

It'd be interesting to scale it up significantly. Maybe it would carry more weight? I don't know the legalities involved, but I've heard of some international mail order prescription drugs getting intercepted by the government. Are the laws more permissive when bringing prescriptions prescribed to the traveler, on their person?

Imagine a charter bus that takes a full load of people once per month from the US to Canada from regionally close cities (e.g. Chicago, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York) for insulin and other critical but expensive prescription drugs. The bus takes them to a pharmacy, everyone unloads and picks up their prescriptions, then loads back into the bus. Everything is called in, pre-arranged with the pharmacy for a streamlined operation.

It's a really stupid situation and possible solution that shouldn't be viable. Unfortunately, it probably could be done.

I don't know if there are laws preventing someone from being physically in france while practicing telemedicine in the US, but surely they'd have to be licenses to practice in the US (which the vast majority of french practitioners won't be).

Well as a French citizen I can call a French doctor to describe my symptoms from wherever I am.

So I think doing so as a foreigner shouldn't be a problem provided you can speak French or English depending on the practitioner.

The question is whether the pharmacy is willing to take the hassle of shipping abroad. The UK allows online prescriptions, and lots of pharmacies will basically have you fill in a form and have a doctor give you a prescription as part of the sales process, but most of them still won't ship out of the UK.

Presumably they just don't want the hassle of figuring out regulations or dealing with stuff confiscated at borders.

For drugs that are legal to import into the US surely there must be online pharmacies willing to deliver, though.

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