A real discussion on prescription drug prices....

When I hear all the blithering in the press and with the politicians on high drug prices, it really gets my blood boiling.

All told, prescription-drug spending in the United States rose 9.1 per cent last year. Only three of those percentage points were due to price increases, however, which means that inflation was about the same in the drug sector as it was in the over-all economy.

The fanatical frenzy in the US on high prescription drug prices revealed to be moreso of a hoax then truth. Seniors are again getting all in tizzy about drug prices when the facts don't really bear this out. Read it all here in the New Yorker.

It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later. Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States. Of course, not every drug comes in a generic version. But so many important drugs have gone off-patent recently that the rate of increase in drug spending in the United States has fallen sharply for the past four years. And so many other drugs are going to go off-patent in the next few years-including the top-selling drug in this country, the anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor-that many Americans who now pay more for their drugs than their counterparts in other Western countries could soon be paying less.

As far as I am concerned the whole debate on drug prices is just another crass money grabbing attempt by seniors to get something for nothing.

Is the system broken? I say no. Can it be improved? Why should it be improved? Will the government be able to improve it? Chances are very slim that they could. They may make things a little cheaper over the shorter term but will 'dumb-down' the system so that innovation will decrease, fewer new drugs will be developed for when we are older and some basic discoveries may not be achieved.

Get a life America. Stop trying to steal other people's assets for your own benefits. And if it saves your life, what is too expensive about that?