It used to be that Canadians headed south of the border to get quality care. Now Californians are doing it.
24 thoughts on “The Fruits Of ObamaCare”
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It used to be that Canadians headed south of the border to get quality care. Now Californians are doing it.
Comments are closed.
See, Democrats said Obamacare would reduce healthcare costs, and it has. The more Americans go to Mexico for treatment, the lower healthcare costs will be.
“You would think they’d be saying, ‘Thank You!'”
“Medical tourism” predated Obamacare. But it was more important to have the appearance of universal health care coverage than a cheap, viable medical industry that actually can make us healthier and happier. Good thing someone is willing to fill that role, even if they aren’t necessarily in the US.
Pharmaceuticals are way cheaper in mexico, far less expensive then in the US.
If you say so, but why is that the case?
Why are pharmaceuticals cheaper in Mexico then the US.
1) Mexican’s are poorer, so the companies know they can’t charge as much.
2) Mexico has lower tort claims limits, so, the insurance reserve is lower.
3) Mexico has an active import market for pharmaceuticals from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Turkey unlike the US where the market is protected by the big pharma cartels.
4) The mexican government won’t allow imports of drugs above a certain price. You want to sell in Mexico, you sell below the price ceiling.
5) Mexico puts the prices of drugs on the drugs. Have you ever walked into a Pharmacy in the US and ever known what a prescription was going to cost before they gave you the bill? All these psuedo-libertarians talk about “Market” and “Consumer” choice, but you will never hear Rand demand transparent pricing on pharmaceuticals.
It’s the same reason why drugs in Canada are cheaper.
6) All the research and development costs, trials to make sure the drugs are safe and to determine side effects and so on, are all paid by Americans, without whose outsize payments the drugs would never be developed at all. Thanks, America!
Well that’s true in a way you don’t really understand.
Most drug R&D is paid for by NIH, CDC and FDA.
All the promising new compounds are tested in govt labs, universities
and small companies getting federal grants. Once something passes
Phase 1, Phase 2, the Big Pharma companies will conduct the Phase 3
trials and do the paperwork to get it FDA approved.
The other thing of course that makes drugs very expensive in the US is advertising.
Most other countries prohibit drug advertising, to consumers,
so all that marketing budget shows up in the price.
Once something passes Phase 1, Phase 2, the Big Pharma companies will conduct the Phase 3 trials and do the paperwork to get it FDA approved.
So why doesn’t Big Pharma pay for the far cheaper phase 1 and 2 parts? Phase 3 is a very expensive crap shoot. If they did their own research, then they wouldn’t have to offer as much for phase 1 and 2 parts? I think the answer is that government funding just covers industry costs. It doesn’t actually add anything useful to the process other than pumping up a large company’s bottom line.
Big Pharma doesn’t like doing Phase 1 trials because it messes up IRR.
The dollars aren’t that big, but the time frame to get a compound selected,
pushed through Phase 1 and 2, get FDA to accept the results and push
for Phase 3.
Big Pharma would rather invest into the manufacturing lines, the Phase 3s
and the marketing efforts.
It’s just a business model for Big Pharma.
They also much prefer investing into lifestyle drugs then one off treatment drugs.
It’s why there isn’t much going on in antibiotics but lots in Blood Pressure and cholesterol drugs
“The other thing of course that makes drugs very expensive in the US is advertising.”
Lol, you don’t understand how advertising works.
Mexico has an active import market for pharmaceuticals from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Turkey unlike the US where the market is protected by the big pharma cartels.
I believe you mean ‘protected by the US government’. Only the government can ban imports of much cheaper drugs from Mexico, not pharmaceutical companies.
Most of the problems with US healthcare are due to regulations which greatly increase the cost.
When you have a Cartel Capitalism, then, it’s about the same thing.
The Cartels are the Government, and the Government is the Cartels.
The FDA is full of Pharmaceutical Execs, and the congressional committees
that oversee FDA and NIH are all buried in Pharma contributions.
When you have a Cartel Capitalism, then, it’s about the same thing.
How exactly are the EVIL PHARMA COMPANIES going to stop people driving over the border with a truck full of drugs and selling them for a tenth of the price that they would sell in America?
Only the government can afford to waste the money required to do that.
6) Advertising and marketing budgets are much higher in the US.
In Mexico, they don’t advertise FloMax, Lipitor et al.
All those ads on prime time aren’t cheap.
If they stop advertising, they won’t be able to sell cheaper drugs. Because the volume of drugs sold would be less, it might even raise the cost of a drug. The purpose of advertising is to sell more units. Advertising does not necessarily lead to an increase of the price of a product.
#2 is about the only one that has economic sense. The rest of your claims fail basic economics.
Then why don’t you explain why pharmaceuticals are so much cheaper in Mexico?
The fact that pharmaceuticals are cheaper in Mexico has nothing to do with the topic of this post. You moron.
I did.
On the plus side (for Canadians), now that the US healthcare system is a bigger Charlie Foxtrot than the Canadian system, the best Canadian doctors will move back up to Canada. Well, some anyhow.
Canada has it’s trouble’s with health care but it functions.
It’s much like the Educational system, we have better universities but crappy primary schools.
In Canada the basic health care system is solid, but, if you get something obscure, or your
condition isn’t life critical, they are going to put you on the list.
When you have a Cartel Capitalism, then, it’s about the same thing. The Cartels are the Government, and the Government is the Cartels.
Hey, DN Guy, thanks for admitting there is something called Cartel Capitalism. (Most of us call it Crony Capitalism, but if you want to use your own words that’s fine with me.) You now understand that once the free market is removed from an economic sector, there is less incentive to innovate and to lower costs.
My question to you is: what causes Cartel Capitalism? Hint: it has something to do with regulations.
Thanks for joining our side! (No snark intended.)
Drugs are cheaper everywhere in the world outside the U.S. for one, and only one, reason. The governments of essentially all non-U.S. countries impose price controls. That’s especially true of countries with single-payer government healthcare monopolies.
As noted by others here, it is uncontrolled U.S. drug prices that, in essence, subsidize all the medical socialism in the rest of the world. If pharmaceutical companies had to live off what they make on government-dictated prices in the rest of the world, there would be little or no pharma R&D. As it is, there is not only a lot of pharma R&D, but a lot of it is done by companies based outside the U.S. This state of affairs exists entirely because these firms, regardless of headquarters country of origin, are able to sell their goods here at uncontrolled prices.
The American Left has had this explained to them ad infinitum, but they persist in making pointless comparisons between the prices of drugs in the U.S. and any handy foreign country that strikes their fancy – always pejorative to the U.S. – as if existing levels of drug R&D and innovation would persist if the U.S. joined the rest of the world in attempting to legislate a pharmaceutical free lunch program. It would not. A few on the left have actually acknowledged this and even come out publicly as preferring single-payer medical socialism over medical progress. Needless to say, no mass movement along these lines has developed. Good luck on ginning one up, especially in a rapidly aging America.
One reason Americans were generally happy with their healthcare situation, pre-Obamacare, was that continuing medical progress actually makes a lot of difference. The U.S has notably better outcomes when treating most types of cancer and heart disease than the single-payer nations like Canada and the countries of the EU. We don’t even need to go into the relative abundance of expensive diagnostic machines like CAT, PET and MRI scanners in the U.S. versus their starvation-level scarcity most other places.
As to the alleged medical nirvana that is Mexico, I live, for now, in L.A. and have had some experience with cheap Mexican pharmaceuticals. In addition to being price-controlled by the Mexican government, there is an additional reason why many pharmaceuticals sold in Mexico are so, relatively, inexpensive – they’re fakes. Counterfeiting of nearly everything is a big part of Mexico’s economy and drugs are no exception. I got both real and fake drugs in Mexico and it was pure luck of the draw. At least one of the fake preparations caused problems that I still suffer from occasionally. Short of lugging a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer around with me when venturing into Tijuana, I have no idea how to prevent such things from continuing to happen so I’m no longer a customer of Mexican pharmacias. Mexico, by the way, is far from the worst place when it comes to rampant counterfeiting in the drug market. Caveat emptor.