Maple Engineer

Ducks are delicious and eat the way you describe. If I eat ducks I’m eating those things once removed and enjoying it, too.

Democrats?

This is rage bait. How many times a year would this happen? Two? Three? There are more important things to talk about. That’s why they’re taking about this

It violates noise laws where I live. I have called the police because my neighbours were having drunken, obscenity filled screaming matches on their driveway at 3 am. The police have come and told them to knock it the fuck off or they will drag one of them off the jail each time. They haven’t done it outside where they can disturb their neighbours, we are far from the closest, since the third or fourth time I did that.

20% of $1.2 trillion is $240 billion dollars. That is a grotesque amount of profit to make by holding people’s health hostage.

And…

Ok…I wasn’t sure that the point about the cost to manufacture drugs was what you actually meant to say.

Pharmaceutical companies make massive profits. What that means is that after all of the money they spend on all of the things you’re referring to they still make massive profit. I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t make profit but that that profit should not be unlimited. The American healthcare system if grotesque. It is unique in the highly developed world in that grotesqueness. They wouldn’t sell Epipens in Canada for 20% of what they sell them for in the US if they weren’t making a profit on them. And, to be clear, Epipens contain epinephrine the wholesale cost of which is $5/mg and an Epipen delivers 0.3 mg which means that the drug in the Epipen costs around $1.50 wholesale. Is the little plastic pen with the spring in it worth $600? I don’t think so. I don’t even think that it’s worth the $150 you pay in Canada. You can have a pharmacist load a syringe for you for $15.

I’m not sure that you said what you intended to say. Do you want to revisit it before I respond?

Yes. Companies that invest in drugs development deserve to make a profit. Patents protect their investment for a limited amount of time. They should not be able to make unlimited amounts of profit forever. What the drug price controls in Canada do is prevent a company from making a cosmetic change, like adding another stripe to the capsule of Losec, calling is Prilosec, and jacking up the price or increasing by 10 fold the price of an Epipen because you made a minor change to the delivery system. If there isn’t a proportionate increase in benefit to the patient you can’t raise the price in Canada.

$16 billion per year.

That’s not the point, though, of course. The point is that US pharmaceutical companies sell their drugs into Canada at 1/4 to 1/10 the price because they still make profit and having $100 in your pocket instead of $1,000 is better than having $0 in your pocket.

Canada has price control of drugs. Drug manufacturing can’t increase the price of a drug unless there is a proportionate increase in benefit to the patient. That’s why epipens are 1/5 the price in Canada that they are in the US.

The argument that drug companies will do doing research and coming up with new drugs if they can’t make unlimited profit is ridiculous. They are greedy fucks and will take the lower profit to keep lining their pockets. Canada proves that.

That you can’t have price control and profits is a lie.

My first thought.

As in the US “free speech” is a white supremacist code word for hate speech.