That’s not an accurate reflection of reality. In reality, NAFTA was negotiated in good faith, and all 3 sides made significant concessions while also holding onto a few key things.
In Canada we held onto the dairy stuff and Cancon, while the US holds desperately onto its massively subsidized agricultural industry.
Now the US is having a tantrum and breaking crockery, mostly to impress the people who don’t understand what is happening, and the rest of the world is figuring out how to manage the tantrum.
Any competent parent will tell you that the least successful option (long-term) is to give into the toddler’s demands. Don’t raise your voice, and provide a clear set of options and clear consequences that have meaning and impact for the toddler. Like Trump, a toddler is basically a sociopath with little capacity for empathy or seeing other points of view.
I wonder if they would have more success just floating the idea of implementing a massive tax on hotel rooms (empty or not). It would be stupid to do it, but it might get through to Trump’s pocketbook in a way that other things do not.
Socialised medicine will have one ‘company’, in this case a government organisation, that will have the best buying negotiation ability as they represent the whole market.
As it works by taking a little bit of money from everyone to buy the overall care and then using that care only on those that need it, this is the most cost effective way for all people to obtain that care.
If a poor country is not able to raise enough cash from the whole population to treat some of the population in this way, then it certainly isn’t going to be able to without socialised medicine.
Socialised medicine does not prevent other buying options for the general public. People don’t travel abroad for newer treatments because socialised medicine somehow prevents this in the home country, it is because of home country regulations that try to prevent the general public from being the testing phase of the new treatment.
I have a long standing “script” from a Canadian pharmacy, and have never had a consult with a Canadian doc. The drug is a blood pressure medication, and I’m able to fill it 200 pills at a time by faxing to them a hand-written prescription from my doc here in the US. They never ask me any questions, and they are seriously cheaper, which is why I do it.
So you might want to educate yourself about the dumpster fire that is American healthcare.
I was never arguing for or against NAFTA, the PCT is a much larger treaty than NAFTA and membership to one does not mean membership to the other. Economically speaking invalidating these patents would do great harm to the Canadian people and not as some repercussion done by the US government but rather from the actions of their own government. It would no longer make economic sense to bring all new drugs to Canada from a business standpoint, or maybe as their own form of protest, none at all, in which case it would be up to generic companies to produce drugs they may not be fully equipped to make immediately or depending on how complex it is to make at all due to costs associated with manufacture at a given scale.
No but it’s like normal insurance here. If you need a given medicine or surgery there are many different options but if your plan isn’t of a certain tier you may not be approved for the latest and greatest. The government will still have to negotiate with these drug companies on a price. The companies are American and can do what they want. They don’t have to budge on price (in the event they invalidate a patent). So in poorer countries the average person cannot afford many treatments, and neither can their government (even with good negotiating), so unless there are tourists constantly visiting those countries who may be able to afford the newer more expensive treatments they won’t enter that market. Its a business move. They want to make money off their product.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with 14 - 15 year patents, they are provably a social good. Well, at least at the national level.
Other “intellectual property” laws, such as insanely long copyrights and overly broad patent interpretation, serve to crush innovation and thus social mobility, keeping the mostly brownish working poor in their place and the mostly pinkish idle aristocracy spawned by sociopathic robber barons in theirs.
I have no sympathy for the po-mouthing of giant, fantastically profitable drug companies that claim to have huge unsubsidized research costs driving them to the brink of bankruptcy and preventing them from selling medicines profitably. That’s pure propaganda, and quite frankly that propaganda convinces me that the propagandists are completely amoral.
Nope. They’re a social bad for the public’s pharmacopeia. You get that pharmaceuticals research is (and should be) mostly paid for by the public, right? Private pharmaceutical companies spend the largest part of their budgets on marketing. You’re argument presumes that the pharmaceuticals companies won’t innovate without being granted a temporary monopoly, but that’s based on some fantasy of a world where charging the public for drugs they already paid to research isn’t a kind of double taxation to support corporate welfare.
No, my argument is based on historical precedent; those countries that have implemented some type of reasonably limited patent law have experienced notable eras of invention. Which is admittedly a logically imperfect argument, as I cannot absolutely prove the connection between the two factors at this time.
I share your opinions and concern over the financing of big pharma from the public pocketbook. If pill vendors are going to claim they aren’t being paid enough for research while simultaneously making huge profits through ethically reprehensible price gouging (Hello there Mister Shrekeli), I’d rather stop paying them. Save the money for less morally challenged researchers!
> Bill went online and found such a pharmacy. Since then, he has regularly ordered the medication from Canadian outlets, which, after verifying his prescription, have the Copaxone shipped from the United Kingdom to him.
> A 28-week supply—one injectable vial per week—most recently cost him $1,200 from a Canadian pharmacy. The last time he checked prices of the same supply at U.S. pharmacies, he saw it would have cost him between $4,500 and $5,550, Bill said.
_> _ > Bill said he is happy with the thousands of dollars over the years that he’s saved from buying from Canada, and with the effectiveness of the drug, which has kept his eye condition in check.
_> _ > But Bill’s international online shopping violates the law—a fact that he was unaware of until he spoke with CNBC this week.
_> _ > It is illegal for individuals to import prescription drugs into the United States, with rare exceptions.
My education required one google search and five minutes of reading. A practice I highly recommend, and do try to follow.
In any war, it’s best to understand the enemy’s intentions. (Otherwise, if you have completely different ideas about what winning and losing are, both sides can destroy each other, convinced that they’re Winning!)
Is this really all about:
Trying to drain the Wisconsin milk lake?
The unfairly even US-Canada steel and aluminum trade?
Canadian shoe runners?
Or that Canada ends up being the contrary example for just about every idiot idea that they want to stick Americans with?
“I think that the West Wing of the White House, and that specific group – [Stephen] Miller, [Peter] Navarro, [Robert] Lighthizer, I’d say even [former advisor Steve] Bannon is having some influence here – they hate what Canada represents and what Canada represents looks very similar to what the previous administration was fighting for on a global basis,” Heyman told BNN Bloomberg on Monday.
“It’s the fair treatment of women in the workplace, it’s making sure the environment is taken care of, equal pay for equal work, understanding that refugees need a place. … This country and the United States were made of immigrants.”
