The drug companies are still making a profit over their marginal costs of production and distribution. They are not recovering proportionate R&D costs from the Canadian market. The U.S. consumer is picking up a disproportionately large share of the tab for R&D for the Canadian market (among many others).
‘They are not recovering proportionate R&D costs from the Canadian market.’
They’re also not recovering the enormous expense of advertizing, which is necessary to tell Baby Boomers that they don’t have to go through life with leaky bladders or set aside five minutes once a week to take their medication, like their parents did back in the Stone Age.
American television is absolutely innundated with stupid comercials, run ad nauseum, hawking quiality-of-life drugs, 24/7, that promise to relieve symptoms that people just used to put up with, while the drugs themselves hardly do anything to cure or treat the underlying conditions (with notable exceptions, of course).
Oh, and everyone of these meds seems to have 72 side-effects, one of which always seems to be diarrhea or constipation -— which is appropos since the target market (Baby Boomers) are all full of you-know-what, anyways.
‘Brave New World’ it seems, was more than just a novel to these folks.
Alternately, one could say that the US consumer is a sucker, paying full pop for drugs when practically every other country in the world has some system of price controls. The drug companies don’t mind - they make back all their R&D dollars with exorbitant prices in the US, and then make decent money selling them in the rest of the world. My natural inclination is to say that price controls like we have in Canada are not a good idea (although they seem to pay off for us), but to not have them when practically everyone else does, yeah, I’d have to say that makes you a bunch of suckers on this deal.