To the extent that it is mostly an excuse to hide ideological motives. For every possible change, there has to be a neighbouring country which applied just that (or further away, we recently had a fierce discussion about the “kiwi model” consisting of the New Zealand way of using government tenders for drugs). Regardless of any other circumstances which might differ and make the comparison worthless.

I am going to make a list of all the things that I have heard that I don’t know are true. After I do that, I’ll go from there.

In the mean time, I’ll stick to the one thing I know is true. There is an imaginary line over which were I to cross, I could get drugs cheaper than if I stayed on this side of that line.

The reason we can not cross that over that line, or have the ‘other-side-of-the-line-people’ ship the drugs to us at the lower price is that the people who have the power to make us pay more have persuaded the people who have the power to let us pay less to stop us from paying less.

In a nutshell, we are paying a sales tax to the pharmaceuticals. They are just tossing out strawmen to cover the action taken by our ‘duly elected representatives in our democratic nation’.

Nothing new or rare in that for our ‘duly’ folk.

As for the remedy for that, that too is a prescription issue.

Singapore, with something closer to a real price system, spends half as much as France (as a percent of gdp). That’s so little that the doctors’ salaries are half of it.

I think the refusal to consider policies of other countries is a cultural predisposition of American politics. It may have something to do with how the US was born as the partial opposition to the Old World, so to adopt any meaninful policy from Europe would be seen as un-American. As others have pointed out, the political discourse is different in other parts of the world.