I’m saying this as someone who did work for a mid sized company manufacturing medical equipment.
US drug prices are not higher because of R&D costs or whatever. They are higher because when we sold stuff in Europe, the big deal was whether we can sell one treatment for 3 or 4 EUR in a particular country as we were negotiating with the government, when we sold to the US, the megacorp buying it (the only entity we could sell to realistically, as they own 75% of the relevant US market segment) said they will not buy it under 100 USD, and then they also acquired the company I was working at and 3 others like it in a single year.
This was under Biden BTW.
Also, FDA approvals are anecdotally very different from EU approvals. Here, you do the relevant trials, fill the requisite forms, the standards are high, but objective. With the FDA, it’s all up to an expert panel, and it can be often hard to understand their subjective requirements.
An optimistic take would be that the US oligarchy will eventually collapse under this chaos and something better might emerge. The pessimistic take is that something worse might also emerge. Or the elite might just carry on despite the collapse, like in 1990 Russia.
I’m saying this as someone who did work for a mid sized company manufacturing medical equipment.
US drug prices are not higher because of R&D costs or whatever. They are higher because when we sold stuff in Europe, the big deal was whether we can sell one treatment for 3 or 4 EUR in a particular country as we were negotiating with the government, when we sold to the US, the megacorp buying it (the only entity we could sell to realistically, as they own 75% of the relevant US market segment) said they will not buy it under 100 USD, and then they also acquired the company I was working at and 3 others like it in a single year.
This was under Biden BTW.
Also, FDA approvals are anecdotally very different from EU approvals. Here, you do the relevant trials, fill the requisite forms, the standards are high, but objective. With the FDA, it’s all up to an expert panel, and it can be often hard to understand their subjective requirements.
An optimistic take would be that the US oligarchy will eventually collapse under this chaos and something better might emerge. The pessimistic take is that something worse might also emerge. Or the elite might just carry on despite the collapse, like in 1990 Russia.