The Food and Drug Administration’s unprecedented approval of Florida’s plan to import drugs from Canada was made possible only after Alex Azar, as the Trump administration’s Health and Human Services secretary, certified that bringing medicines over the border could be done safely.
Azar made the historic declaration in September 2020, just two months before his boss, former President Donald Trump, lost reelection.
Now, Azar’s involved in the business of making importation happen. He is chairman of the board of LifeScience Logistics, a Dallas-based company that Florida is paying as much as $39 million to help manage its Canadian drug importation program, not including the cost of drugs.
LifeScience officials confirmed Azar’s position but didn’t respond to questions about how much he is paid or whether he’s involved in the Florida work. Azar didn’t return messages left with his employers or sent to a personal email address.
Canada should ban these exports. Even just Florida is going to cause a huge drain on their supplies, and it shouldn’t be up to Canada to subsidize our failure to control drug prices.
I think it’s a difficult balance, because we’re also talking about poor people who possibly don’t even have insurance being able to get the medication they need. I don’t think Azar is going about it properly by any means, but there’s a reason people take healthcare “vacations” across the Mexican border when they live in a border state. They’re fucking desperate. They might even be dying. Or they might be psychotic without medication.
I absolutely would not recommend this because of quality control issues, but about 20 years ago, I lost my health insurance and I am Bipolar Type II, so I had to import drugs from India to stop the suicidal thoughts I was having, bought on the cheap over the internet. I didn’t have any other option because I sure as hell couldn’t afford to pay full price for what I needed. Now I need a bunch of medication due to other medical issues and that is likely to increase. If I lost my insurance now, I’d have to do it again or I would be in serious physical pain and mental anguish.
Canada should definitely prioritise its own manufacturing, but I’d say banning goes too far. It’s possible to control exports without diminishing domestic supplies.
Short term it might be an issue, but wouldn’t this be a good opening for more manufacturing capacity to come online which then means more profits for Canadian manufacturers and more taxes for the government?
Seems like a new gold mine if done properly
Yes exactly. There is room for Canadian businesses to profit, and for Canadian soceity to profit through tax income, with no implication to the Canadian public health service - all the while still providing far cheaper products to the US market.
However this would require extremely tight regulation of the drug production market, such that they can’t increase prices in Canada or prioritise selling to the US.
How much of the Canadian drug supply is imported from the US in the first place? How many manufacturers in Canada are independent and not just local operations of international pharmaceutical companies?
In those scenarios why would they ship more drugs to Canada to be reimported into the US or expand their manufacturing capabilities in Canada? To sell the drugs at a lower price than they can get by selling them in the US directly? They’d be losing money. Instead they’d keep the Canadian imports/manufacturing flat or on pace with existing growth in the country so that there will be shortages and export restrictions.
If politicians in Florida of all places like the benefits of Canadian price controls then perhaps they should start adopting them here in the US.
Canada only has one Canadian-owned pharma company (Apotex). The rest are all foreign-owned. :/
I agree. Keep the spruce moose south of the border
I’d say that big pharma has too bit of a stranglehold on American politics that it is almost impossible to fight American drug companies using the status quo.
The drug industry’s major lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, previously sued to stop Azar’s importation decision. It’s expected to file suit to block Florida’s program as well.
Also, I do not believe there will be a supply shortage, I imagine Canada’s prices might go up as there becomes more of a reliance. But a supply shortage is a huge leap. If they have the medicine to sell, let them. Free market and shit.
Drugmakers argue the policy puts patients at risk of consuming counterfeit medicines.
If this was a huge deal, they would have gone after Amazon and supplementals years ago.
This whole issue is being astroturfed by greedy American pharmaceutical companies that want to keep lining their pockets with rediciulous prices, and greedy American politicians that want to get their cut in the importation business.
End result is that nothing meaningful will change for people who are supposed to be helped by this. What a shame.
But this politican stopped working for the greedy pharmaceuticals and is working for the ones that want to undercut them.
It sounds more like he made his own company viable.
Man passed a rule on his way out of his last job that made it so he could be paid millions to implement that rule in his new job. That’s not altruism or “fighting big pharma,” that’s just making a new market for yourself as a middleman.
It might actually help people, but with all the self dealing, dont assume that matters to the people involved.
That’s exactly my point.
So what, are we now trying to argue that broken clocks are always wrong?
