You’re in trouble if you have to buy your own brand-name prescription drugs. Over the past decade, prices leaped by more than double the inflation rate. Treatments for chronic conditions can easily top $2,000 a month-no wonder that one in four Americans can’s afford to fill their prescriptions. The solution? A hearty chorus of “O Canada.” North of the border, where price controls reign, those same brand-name drugs cost 50% to 80% less.
The Canadian option is fast becoming a political wake-up call, “If our neighbors can buy drugs at reasonable prices, why can’t we? Even to whisper that thought provokes anger. “Un-American!” And-the propagandists’ trump card (王牌)—“Wreck our brilliant health-care system.” Supersize drug prices, they claim, fund the research that sparks the next generation of wonder drugs. No sky-high drug price today, no cure for cancer tomorrow. So shut up and pay up.
Common sense tells you that’s a false alternative. The reward for finding, say, a cancer cure is so huge that no one’s going to hang it up. Nevertheless, if Canada-level pricing came to the United States, the industry’s profit margins would drop and the pace of new-drug development would slow. Here lies the American dilemma. Who is all this splendid medicine for? Should our health-care system continue its drive toward the best of the best, even though rising numbers of patients can’t afford it? Or should we direct our wealth toward letting everyone in on today’s level of care? Measured by saved lives, the latter is almost certainly the better course.
To defend their profits, the drug companies have warned Canadian wholesalers and pharmacies (药房) not to sell to Americans by mail, and are cutting back supplies to those who dare.
Meanwhile, the administration is playing the fear card. Officials from the Food and Drug Administration will argue that Canadian drugs might be fake, mishandled, or even a potential threat to life.
Do bad drugs fly around the Internet? Sure-and the more we look, the more we’ll find, But I haven’t heard of any raging epidemics among the hundreds of thousands of people buying crossborder.
Most users of prescription drugs don’t worry about costs a lot. They’re sheltered by employee insurance, owing just a $20 co-pay. The financial blows rain, instead, on the uninsured, especially the chronically ill who need expensive drugs to live, This group will still include middle-income seniors on Medicare, who’ll have to dig deeply into their pockets before getting much from the new drug benefit that starts in 2006. 【題組】28. How do propagandists argue for the U.S. drug pricing policy?
(A) Low prices will affect the quality of medicines in America.
(B) High prices are essential to funding research on new drugs.
(C) Low prices will bring about the anger of drug manufacturers.
(D) High-price drugs are indispensable in curing chronic diseases.
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