THE HIGH COST OF HEALTHCARE

Why Americans Pay So Much For Brand Name Drugs
I am struggling a bit with the idea that reimportation back to the US of drugs made in America and sold to Canada is one of the solutions.

I believe Canada regulates prices, so they are much lower. So it does seem as that if one wishes to lower prices it makes more sense to merely emulate the Canadian approach, rather than add a Canada as a middleman.

One could make a decent case that the US consumer is filling the profit gap created by single payer price regulations in other countries.

I have not looked at it recently, but SGA (Sales, General and Administrative) Costs at big US Pharma firms had ballooned in the past twenty years as a factor on corporate balance sheets.

For example:

“In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita, as compared with $307 per capita in Canada. After exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0 percent of health care expenditures in the United States and 16.7 percent of health care expenditures in Canada. Canada’s national health insurance program had overhead of 1.3 percent; the overhead among Canada’s private insurers was higher than that in the United States (13.2 percent vs. 11.7 percent). Providers’ administrative costs were far lower in Canada.”

New England Journal of Medicine, Aug 21, 2003

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