Chicken. schreef op 28 januari 2016 18:43:
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Dit lijkenmij geen gefigneerde cijfers. Ik weet dat uit ervarign dat dezelfd epil in Canada stukken goedkoper is.
Redenen: prijscontrole. Greed. Incompetent politicians (of beter, hele slimme politici want makkelijk rijk worden van donaties van J&J etc). Of: Reaganism, or how to destruct a the wealthiest nation in the world in just a few decades.
Here are six of the top reasons:1. No price controls
The US government doesn't regulate prices, unlike many countries where government agencies negotiate prices for every drug.
In the US, drugmakers set wholesale prices based mostly on what competing brand-name drugs cost and whether their new drug is better, said Les Funtleyder, healthcare portfolio manager at E Squared Asset Management.
2. Lengthy patents
Patents last longer than in other countries, usually giving a drug's maker exclusivity that prevents competition for 20 years from when the patent is issued. Because patents are filed while drugs are still in testing, that clock starts ticking long before the drug goes on sale.
Typically, new drugs end up with a monopoly for roughly a dozen years.
Their makers generally increase their prices every year, by about 5% or more. Those increases add up and become bigger as the expiration of the patent approaches.
3. Limited competition
For many drugs, there isn't enough competition to hold down prices. Many older generic drugs were priced too low to be profitable, so some drugmakers stopped making them. Once only one company or two companies make a drug, the price usually shoots up.
For older, brand-name drugs that treat conditions too rare to attract multiple manufacturers, the sole maker has a de facto monopoly.
Funtleyder noted that the large backlog of generic drugs awaiting US regulatory approval means that for some off-patent drugs, only one or two generic versions have been approved. That limits reductions from the brand-name drug's price.
Scores of drugs, mostly older, once-cheap generics, have been in short supply over the last decade. Reasons include raw material shortages and manufacturing deficiencies involving dirty factories, pills containing the wrong amount of an active ingredient and other serious problems, particularly at factories in India.
Those trigger production shutdowns or temporary bans on their sale in the US.
Also, several drugmakers have recently been buying rights to older drugs, then hiking the price, as Turing did with Daraprim.
4. Small markets
Many new drugs are for rare conditions or cancer subtypes involving a particular genetic mutation, so they might help just thousands or hundreds of patients. To recoup research and development costs, drugmakers set high prices, though they offer many patients financial assistance.
5. Development and production costs
Research is becoming increasingly expensive. Industry groups say it can take about a decade and well over $1 billion to get a new drug approved, though that includes development costs for the many drugs that don't work out.
The most-exorbitant new drugs are biologics, produced by living cells under precise conditions, which costs far more than mixing chemicals to make pills.
6. Fewer new generics
After a huge wave of patent expirations from 2011 through 2013 that brought generic versions of drugs taken daily by millions of patients, the number of popular drugs going off patent has declined. That has contributed to total US spending on medicine rising.