Scandinavia - working socialist economies?

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
The American consumer ... is paying the tab for R&D whilst Europe and Canada set price controls on drugs. Private European drug companies certainly exist but they're not investing billions to develop new treatments because of demand at home, but the gold mine across the Atlantic. The day that US medicine goes completely socialized will be a day for the sick to truly weep.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are ignoring the factor of greed, here. I submit that the human race is consuming far more drugs than are actually needed, as a whole, and I mean far, far more!

I further submit that this excess is more pronounced in the United States than in the other industrialised democracies.

If pharmaceutical companies have a market to plunder, in Europe or America, they will go right ahead and do it. Why are you surprised or upset that the European pharmas are getting rich by giving the American consumers the fix they crave? If the drug habit was more pronounced in Europe than in America, the argument against "greedy Americans riding off the bak of Europeans" would be equally meaningless.

The problem is too much drug use.

Pharmas create demand, control R&D, promote incessantly higher drug use, corrupt MDs into promoting drug use (sometimes to the detriment of the patient's health), maintain expansive, possessive and aggressive networks of salesmen & distributors -- and they over-price like street drug dealers.

...Those guys are a cinch to take over the heroin, crack and cocaine trade when it will be legalised! They wrote the book.

[lehighguy]

Dude, how exactely is taking medicine that helps with a variety of diseases "excessive use". I'm not talking about Ritalin here, but the myriad of effective drugs that have been developed in the last 30 years to treat any number of diseases and conditions.

When I was in Japan I got sick and was having diareah every 15 min. I went to the Japanese doctor and he basically just gave me a few vitamins and told me to wait it out. Well, after two weeks I was back home and I was tired of still having diareah every 15 min. So I went to me American doctor, got a preserciption, and I was fine in a day.

Maybe that is excessive to you, but I'm glad I don't still have the shits.

[ACPlayer]

I would submit to you that we are taking too many drugs, specially for those conditions that are long term. These are driven by the drug companies.

Take two points:

1. In the 80's the drug companies fought for and had the law passed that allowed them to market directly to consumers rather than by educating doctors. This has resulted in an explosion of ads for conditions that before that people generally ignored. Now people go to doctors having seen a 30 second commercial about a symptom they "recognize" and ask for a drug. Neither the consumer nor the doctor has any disincentive from using this drug as the costs are simply borne by the insurance companies. Those marketing costs are of course built into the cost of the drugs.

2. Take cholestrol. Used to be that the threshhold considered high was 240 then 220 then 200 then 160. Each of these numbers comes from drug company sponsored research. Each of these adds a large swath of the population to the market so that the meat, cake, and Haagen Dazs consumers can get there "free" lipitor and stave of heart disease. Hah!

Drugs are sold to us like deoderant and are not offered to us by knowledgeable doctors treating our conditions anymore.

Now an informed consumer is a good thing, but the drug companies are pushing ritalin, lipitor, prozac as the solution to all sorts of problems real and imagined.