According to Gabriel Levitt and Sam Werbalowsky of Pharmacychecker.com in material written April 18, 2014, the American people pay some of the highest drug prices in the world. The following information comes from these two authors, The Huffington Post and Vox.com and the International Federation of Health Plans.
In the United States we pay $395.00 for a prescription for Nexium that costs the people of the Netherlands $23.00. Everyone of course knows how great that little purple capsule is.
Copaxone, a medication used to treat multiple sclerosis costs $862.00 in England and the same medication in the U.S. costs $4,018.00.
Hospitals are even more costly in the U.S. and average out to $4,293 per day as compared to Spain which costs $481.00 per day. Some politicians would have you believe we are paying higher prices for the best health care in the world. Not true. We are paying more for health care that ranks 37th in the world, behind every industrialized country in the world.
We can go on and on making price comparisons but all of the comparisons point to the same thing. American citizens are being gouged by the pharmaceutical industry and health care industry in general. Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population of the world but use almost 50 percent of all pharmaceuticals in the world.
Why? America is one of two industrialized countries in the world in which Big Pharma is allowed to advertise directly to its citizens. For every $100,000.00 they spend they get 28 new drug users of their medication. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to advertise their product bring them massive results from the uneducated masses of people in the U.S. of A.
Probably one of the main reasons for this can be seen by going back a little ways in time to look at our Congress during the young Bush Administration. They conspired to pass a law in which our government would never arbitrate with giant pharmaceutical companies on the prices they charge in our country. I do not know who got rich from this sweetheart deal but I do know the American people got much poorer.
Why does our American government want to break the backs of the average American tax payer? Your guess is as good as mine. God bless you all. RRR
