President Biden has announced that he is going to reduce some pharmaceutical prices. He should get some history first and that would make his job easier.
Years ago, I worked for a drug manufacturer in Syracuse, NY. After a year as a bench chemist, I was promoted to a supervisory position that ran the second shift filling and packaging department. I had about 160 employees and with 14 filling and packaging lines for tablets, capsules and powders and there were also, 3 sterile filling lines for parental products. I loved the job and worked at it for about 8 years until I was promoted to assistant to the Vice-President of Manufacuring. I was replaced in the packaging department by the third shift supervisor because the third shift had been discontinued. The company had built a new facility in Puerto Rico to take advantage of the new tax plan to aid the island in their economic problems. I later became a "Man in Plant" as the FDA referred it as our products were being produced by other drug companies and I had to be present when production occurred. During this time the company built more plants in Puerto Rico and the sterile filling operation went South and later most of the other packaging operations. My old building was shut down. I later changed jobs and moved to Morgantown, WV. Over the years as I traveled to NY to see family, I would pass my old plant as it slowly disappeared with the chemical production that made the bulk drug products left for Italy and other countries. The penicillin that we fermented and made into usable dosages now was a foreign product. In later years, I worked to build a plant in Puerto Rico for my new company to take advantage of the tax plan. At that time there were about 100 drug companies that had moved to Puerto Rico along with another 150 non-drug companies.
During the Clinton administration the Senate stopped the tax advantage and most of the drug companies left because without the tax reduction profits were eaten up with transportation and shipping costs. Puerto Rico has never recovered from the enormous loss of jobs and is running about 50% unemployment. I have written about this before but now the rest of the story, The drug companies did not come back to the mainland but went overseas. Many of the drug companies were bought or merged into European companies that had been operating in the US for years and for the last 20 or 30 years many of them have moved their production to India and other Eastern countries. China is producing many of our raw materials and the US has lost the capability to produce even the penicillin that I was involved in for many years. We are at the mercy of foreign governments, many that are not the friendliest, for many of our most needed drug products. Most of these foreign countries have very strict price controls on drug products so their main revenue producing avenue is to sell in the US at high prices where there are no price controls. We have become the profit center for the worlds' drug producers both legal and illegal. It is sad that our health system is being held hostage by foreign companies and our politicians love their lobbyists money for their re-elections.
If the President or the Congress was really interested in helping to lower drug prices, they could easily put tariffs on all imported drug products that are sold at a price higher than they sell for in the country of manufacture. Thie might even convince some of our own companies to return manufacturing to the US and stop the blackmail being used by other countries or their freedom to restrict prescription drug use by high cost. I am taking a drug that was costing me $750 per month co-pay and my doctor wanted me to double the dose which would raise my cost to $1500 per month. She suggested that I go to the hospital once a month and receive an infusion that would take about an hour. This would be completely paid for by Medicare and my insurance. So, have and I am saving a lot of money. It is infuriating to me that charging two to three times as much for the infusion than receiving the self-administered doses which I have to pay for is free to me. The government is OK for this, and the only reason has to be the Medicare lobbying by the drug companies and the hospitals. So much for an honest politician. I do not believe the President can or will be able to do much to reduce prices until the media starts to tell the real story about the pharmaceutical industry and the lobbying that is preventing a lot of problems being solved. Think about it. Drug products are just the tip of the iceberg. How many industries are doing the same thing such as using slave labor to produce our cell phones or the clothes that we wear. It is an enormous problem and will not be solved until there are term limits in Congress.
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