Pull Up the Roots
Breakfast for dinner.
The subsidized claim as well as the innovation claim are the same ones we've been hearing forever. And they don't really hold up anymore.
Misleading on US drug costs:
"It is more the drug companies that are taking advantage of the U.S.” Glen T. Schumock, director of the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomic Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told us via email. “We allow the drug companies to do this by not regulating drug prices. Other counties are just doing what makes sense, and what we should do. The drug companies will claim that they need the high prices in the U.S. to pay for new drug development. But most of the profit is not invested in R&D, and recent evidence shows that the cost to develop a new drug is actually much lower than they claim."
In the U.S., elected officials — mostly Republicans — have been reluctant to enact regulations to control drug prices, Schumock said. “The argument is that price controls will prevent innovation and new drug development.”
The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, passed in 2003 largely with Republican votes, specifically prohibited Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.
That’s not how it works in other countries. Most other developed countries have a centralized health care system that allows the government to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies.
“The government of those countries tells the drug company what the price will be,” Schumock said. “If the company doesn’t like it their only choice is to not sell it there. Most of the time they sell it at that price because they are still making money even with the low price. They certainly wouldn’t sell the drug if they were losing money.”
Or, as Dr. Peter B. Bach, director of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, wrote to us in an email, “Firms are never required to sell a product in to any country, so what France pays is a decision between the firm and France, it has no relation to what we pay. Put another way, the firm will seek to maximize in France regardless.”
Trump’s argument “would suggest that firms would lower their prices in France (as an example) if we paid more here,” Bach said. “There is no economic reason for this to happen. Rather, companies clearly find it long term profitable to sell at the prices they do sell at in Western countries.”
Bach also takes issue with the president’s characterization that “they’re setting prices in other countries and we’re not.”
“Price setting conceptually only applies when there is truly a monopsonistic buyer that has complete control over the potential market for the seller,” Bach said. “What actually happens, and this varies somewhat by country but still, is that the country exercises some market power and a lot of discretion, being willing to say ‘No’ to products due to a disconnect between their price and their benefit. There are many versions of how they do this, but the core principle is that they are willing to say, ‘No.'”
Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “subsidizing” the cost in other countries suggests that Americans are paying too much to make up for losses in other countries, Bach said. “That is wrong in all likelihood because firms would simply choose not to sell at a loss.”
“More important,” Bach said, “it is often said we subsidize the industry by paying for their R&D [research and development].”
But research he co-authored earlier this year found that drug companies spent much less on R&D than steeper prices in the U.S. could potentially fund. “The premiums pharmaceutical companies earn from charging substantially higher prices for their medications in the US compared to other Western countries generates substantially more than the companies spend globally on their research and development,” Bach’s study said. Specifically it concluded that the extra amount paid for drugs by U.S. consumers paid for 1.7 times the worldwide R&D expenses.
R&D Costs For Pharmaceutical Companies Do Not Explain Elevated US Drug Prices:
That pharmaceutical companies charge much more for their drugs in the United States than they do in other Western countries has contributed to public and political distrust of their pricing practices. When these higher US prices (which are sometimes cited as being two to five times the prices in Europe) are challenged, the pharmaceutical industry often explains that the higher prices they charge in the US provide them with the funds they need to conduct their high-risk research.
This claim—that premiums earned from charging US patients and taxpayers more for medications than other Western countries funds companies’ research—is empirically testable. Pharmaceutical companies report their Research and Development (R&D) expenses in public filings, and both they and numerous other sources report a mix of information on their drugs’ prices and sales volumes in the US and other Western countries. These data allowed us to quantify both the premium companies earn and the amount they spend on research. We then assessed the relation between the two.
. When we move, their costs are going to SKYROCKET. 
But u got to realize everyone has an agenda and won’t present the accurate picture to u on both the capitalist and socialist side. The truth 9/10 is in the middle
