Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less
personalimportation.org
personalimportation.org
I worked for an online pharmacy in Canada for many years, and it’s fraught and full of grey areas for sure. But so so many Americans count on importing generics to afford their medication. You’re talking several times the price difference for the same pills, life changing amounts of money for older people on fixed incomes with health problems. They will simply not be able to access their medication anymore.
The other factor is not price, but availability. Some generic are in limited supply or are outright not available in the US.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.
As a result, the number of imported packages dropped anywhere from 30% to 80%, we'll have to wait for the full numbers, but there is a reason to expect something similar will happen in the US.
Billions and billions... of hearsay.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/29/eu-introduces-...
surely you will apologise now, right?
Don't bend over backwards to defend utterly oppressive regulations, simply increasing the de-minimums would reduce or eliminate package splitting, limiting the number of packs per shipping address would help too - there are many ways to solve this self-inflicted problem which comes from Byzantine regulations that use protectionism as a Trojan horse to achieve other sneaky objectives.
--Scott "The House" Bessent maybe?
But I'm assuming this was a joke about the conspiracy that midterms will be canceled one way or another due to a "national emergency". Which, sadly, is much more probable than it should be.
the seats necessary to alter that aren't even open, how gullible do people have to be? well, not very, independents are the largest bloc now, but of the remaining partisans... hello? your algorithm is fake
Seems to be anyone's win right now: https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/senate/2026/toss-up (and RCP is considered to be conservative).
but it cant pass any laws. they’re still cooked by the filibuster (until they get bored of it)
Granted, 66% chance is still essentially a toss up.
We have learned Kamala was in fact much, much different than Trump, and many peoples rights have been trampled because of this sort of nonsense fatalism.
We are not a developed country. We are a country that chooses to arrange our economy to give some people power over others, at the cost of overall wealth.
costplusdrugs.com
I have no affiliation. If anyone wants a domestic alternative to low cost pharmaceuticals this is a good one. Also sometimes GoodRx is worth checking out. Don’t hesitate to ask a pharmacist for a discount if you’re not using insurance. Sometimes that is the best price.
Their own primer on the topic: https://www.personalimportation.org/understand-the-issue
Canadian pharmacies pay Canadian tariffs. Americans pay American tariffs. American importers are no longer exempted from paying American tariffs applied by the US government for goods de minimis goods they import from Canada.
This post is about American importers no longer having exemption on tariffs they would have otherwise paid to the US government.
At no point has Canadian pharmacies ever paid American tariffs. This is fiction you invented.
These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.
PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.
It's very dangerous to assume common understanding here when Trump has been loudly claiming the opposite, i.e. that the tariffs would be paid by the sender rather than the importer. It would have been more accurate to state that "Canadian pharmacies have already been including the tarrifs in the total order cost".
And that's the problem. It doesn't get much more simple than "Canadians pay Canadian import taxes" and "Americans pay American import taxes". Can you at least recognize that reality? For any country, its own people pay its tariffs.
> required consumers to pay new duties.
Required American consumers to pay new American levied duties.
To be ultra pedantic, you're paying American import tariffs to the American shipping carrier or American broker not CBP itself.
> refunds for it like Americans supposedly did
No one's getting those refunds, if they do get a portion back and not at the rate at which they increased prices on American consumers.
But more to your point, you can certainly pay American import tariffs on behalf of Americans, but your response is to raise prices on American consumers commensurate to the tariffs you're paying. Your margins are necessarily lower to sell to Americans, so you must raise prices for American consumers.
If your margins were high enough that you can absorb American import tariffs, then you're lucky the market hadn't provided a relevant market substitute.
This prevents it.
1 year supply from Northwest? $477 (includes shipping).
1 year supply from CVS? $1395
Not that it'll play out like that, America still has a wealth inequality problem that will insulate some that would otherwise push for a less-broken system. But I'm optimistic by default, and the bright side is more people complaining, loudly, at how broken America's health care system is, and pushing for a fix.
U.S. Small Biz Can't Ship to the EU Anymore
Additionally, Trump, Hassett, etc are still blaming Biden for inflation caused by the tariffs... and a lot of their base would rather believe that than admit that they got suckered by an obvious scam.
I'm starting to see this backfire with a lot of "personal responsibility" type old-school republicans to whom I talk. They're getting fed up with the administration just blanket blaming anything bad on Biden. Whether that will translate to actual political change, I do not know. But I found it interesting that I'm hearing the frustration more lately.
Which is looking quite likely.
Although it does assume there are no peculiar and unexpected anomalies with the vote counting.
The blue wave will likely be a result of blue turnout and some small number of red sitting at home. And sadly the senate is still a toss up
When Obama put a tariff on Chinese tires, right-wingers (correctly) argued that it was a bad idea that caused American consumers to pay almost a million dollars per "job saved" in the tire industry.
Today the right is in control of the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and and far more news media and... basically just crickets.
As for "he controls the executive". Bullshit. When a Democrat is in office, right-wingers remember that the President is not a king.
Please don't "both sides" this extremely one-sided attack on the American worker.
His followers are literally beyond reason and will accept anything he says. It's so very depressing.
He didn't manage to sell them. Everyone hates the tariffs, which are widely understood to have contributed to high prices and economic stagnation.
What he did manage to do is bully the abjectly servile GOP leaders of Congress into not doing anything about the tariffs, even though setting trade policy is expressly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution, and Trump has repeatedly exceeded any legal authority.
Your comment begins "Nope, Congress has authorized ..." which just supports the point of the GP that it is Congress that controls the setting of tariffs, even if that may sometimes mean delegating it to the executive branch.
A situation where a corrupt and incompetent president is explicitly trying to blow up the US economy using not-really-relevant laws as a pretext was not ever anticipated, and he will hopefully be strongly rebuked (e.g. impeached) by the next Congress.
He campaigned and won with tarrifs as one of his main policy points. Voters favour them. Americans get tarrifs because Americans want tarrifs. Deal with it.
We have laws that limit what presidents (and Congress) can do. By extension that limits what voters can get by voting. Americans got/get tariffs because we currently have an administration that is willing to break the law.
In addition, to focus on the point you claim that voters favored them. I've never seen any convincing evidence that this is true, and what evidence I have seen always seems predicated on the claim that the foreign suppliers pay tariffs, which is generally completely false. So, if they were in favor of what they understood, they did not in fact support tariffs in the real world. Further, I did see some polls suggesting that voters favored highly selected tariffs for specific products from specific origins. Again, that's not what the administration has sought to impose.
Even so, I never saw polling that indicated even a plurality of voters were in favor of them one way or another.
Every use case for tarrifs include got subsidy and small trade barriers so it can grow with market share.
the C in CBP, "Customs", is specifically this kind of stuff.
If there is one most-bipartisan-thing-ever, ceding oversight is it. ex:FastTrack Trade
At the time of writing, the article states something that its own link doesn't support (i.e. it is inaccurate). CBP hasn't "suspended all personal prescription importation." What they've done is removed De Minimis Exemption (i.e. duty free below $800), and that's it. Meaning you can still important personal medication before and after Oct 22nd, what has changed is that now it is subject to normal duty.
Do I think this is bad for people importing personal medication? Absolutely I do, and I oppose it. However, I don't think misstating the argument is constructive nor warranted. You could make the argument using the facts on the ground, and then re-state that in the thread title.
So the story is worthy of discussion, and interesting (even the personal medication POV). But this link and this title aren't "it." Hopefully we can get a higher quality source and title on this topic.
This will be financially catastrophic for many Americans who may suddenly have to find hundreds of dollars a month.
I read a lot of it - enjoy reading the butt-covering “legal justifications” written in explaining why there was no public comment period, etc.