Opinion: Canada should stop stealing from drug companies

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Richard Owens: Everyone would be better off if the pharmaceutical industry were more profitable. Read more here

Because revenues are necessary to stay in business, the companies whose profits Canada steals must recoup them elsewhere, which they do from the only honest payers, Americans. Thus do ailing U.S. consumers subsidize Canadian health care, paying prices for patented medicines that average three and a half times controlled Canadian prices. Canada is not the only Omar, however. High prices in the U.S. make up for revenue deficits in the rest of the world.

Everyone would be better off if the pharmaceutical industry were more profitable — pharmaceutical customers included. More profit means more investment in R&D, which results in more drugs that both save and improve lives. Given the vital importance, enormous complexity and high risks of the pharmaceutical business, the return on equity invested in it is much lower than in businesses like automobiles, information technology and financial services.

Canada relies on the U.S. to innovate since we choose not to. Then we rely on U.S. consumers to subsidize our access to American innovations. Price controls do not make the costs of creating and supplying pharmaceuticals go away, however: someone somewhere must bear the actual costs. Thank you, Americans! Not surprisingly, Americans are restive and considering price controls of their own — which could bring the world’s engine of pharmaceutical development to a shuddering halt.

 

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They're not profitable enough? Who in the world is worth this much? With $453M in realized pay in 2021, Regeneron's Schleifer was biopharma's best-paid CEO: Stat

'It steals from corporations involved in the legal and honest pharmaceutical trade whose only sins are to be large, successful and unpopular.' Yeah, right...

silly idea for many reasons

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