Authored by Drew Johnson via PJMedia.com,
Germany just found anew wayto lower its own healthcare costs: make Americans pay more.
In late April, German policymakers proposed changes that cap spending growth, restrict care, and force drugmakers to provide steep discounts.
These changes are supposed to save Germany money. But drugmakers still need to recoup the high costs of research and development.When a country like Germany suppresses the prices it pays for innovative medicines, those costs don't disappear — they simply shift elsewhere.
And because many other wealthy countries use similar price controls, that cost burden is increasingly falling on the United States.
The global imbalance is already stark.
American patients generateroughly three-quartersof global pharmaceutical profits despite accounting forjust a quarterof global GDP. In effect, the United States is underwriting much of the world's drug innovation while patients abroad pay far less for the same treatments.
President Trump has spent months trying to end this freeloading by pressing other countries to pay fair value for new treatments — and he shouldn't let Germany get away with refusing to cooperate.
Foreign mooching off American medical innovation is a real and longstanding problem. Wealthy governments around the world — andespeciallyin Europe — set drug prices by decree, effectively refusing to pay manufacturers fair value for treatments they spend years, sometimes decades, developing.
As a result, drugmakers disproportionately rely on revenue from the United States to sustain research and development.While patients abroad often pay cut-rate prices, Americans pay far more for the same meds. That imbalance is fundamentally unfair.
Source: ZeroHedge News
