WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday blasted pharmaceutical companies for having “rigged the system” against American consumers by charging higher prices in the U.S. than they do abroad, announcing a new proposal he says will help even out those differences.
“We’re taking aim at the global freeloading that forces American consumers to subsidize lower prices in foreign countries through higher prices in our country,” Trump said. “It’s almost unimaginable that it hasn’t been taken care of long before this.”
He called the status quo “wrong” and “not fair,” and suggested the new policy would “allow Medicare to determine the price it pays for certain drugs based on the cheaper prices paid by other nations.”
Mavis
I am not sure where you are going with you comments and at time getting close to personal attacks.
Your suggestion that there is not enough regulations, I wonder where and how especially in pharma. When drug safety regulators tell you how to eat i.e. how hold knife and fork or when to go to the bathroom, I wonder how you would react.
Thanks!
Girish,
It is highly unlikely any drug safety regulator has told anyone how to eat or defecate. A lot of dangerous drugs have been approved. In fact many of the deaths attributed to opiates are actually Polypharmacy. The Pharma Industry manages to keep the facts out of the newspapers, by misreporting the Facts. On the topic of opiates, the pharma industry paid off regulators, lied to physicians and is still misrepresenting their profiteering from the deaths of people, who have been lied to and misinformed.
There are plenty of resources, books and experts out there, perhaps you should pick on one of them. Perhaps if Pharma was seriously concerned about legitimate problems, instead of lying to regulators, gaming the system, and misleading the public, there could be an intelligent discussion on improving the system. They are much more concerned with profits, that creating necessary drugs for humanity. We can see how the Industry responded when they got control with this in their pocket, motivated by greed administration. Now they don’t even need facts or science, and they can repackage old drugs while jacking the price up. They have a lot of help from media too, the Fact that the American public paid for a lot of their research, is censored!
People in this country are dying or being ripped off, because there are not enough regulations!
Mavis,
The drug regulations passed in 1962 increased the time it takes to get a drug to market from about 4 years to about 14 years by the turn of the century. People die waiting as a result and either turn to the black market or try to make the drugs in the pipeline in their kitchen. As the cost of development soars, innovation is lost. No matter how wealthy a person is, s/he cannot buy drugs that have not yet been discovered. Excess regulations, which provide no safety or effectiveness benefits (e.g., the 1962 Amendments to the Food & Drug Act), can be just deadly as bad drugs.
The documentation for this statement is in my book, “Death by Regulation” and in my STAT article (https://www.statnews.com/2018/10/01/changing-1962-law-slash-drug-prices/). Please share the documentation for your statements as they relate to the pharmaceutical industry. Thanks!