What Pharmaceutical Debate?

Beware the pharmaceutical industrial complex. And its stranglehold on the fond attention of government. That is one hugely powerful lobby. And a too-too clever manipulator of physicians and their hapless patients. Foxily manoeuvring public relations and pricey advertising to convince the public that they are ill, ill, ill, and only especially designed pharmaceutical products are capable of lending them a few more years of life.

But people being people, there is an never-ending search for bargains. Who wants to pay the full prevailing price when they can procure the very same product at a highly reduced price? The U.S. believes in the free enterprise system, untrammelled by government interference, while in Canada the government takes a more price-regulatory role. Which means that on-line pharmacies can offer Canadian prices to price-sensitive Americans.

The on-line pharmacies mop up business, scrambling to fill the need for American consumers of drug products, and the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. screams bloody murder. So along comes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to most convincingly assert that foreign-produced products have not been approved - by their rigid standards, and therefore there is little guarantee of their efficacy.

Now the issue has turned from pharmaceuticals to birth control devices issuing from Canadian manufacturers. Which, like their drug counterparts, cost a whole lot less procured from a Canadian source than an American manufacturer. Take IUDs; the charge is $700 for product and um, installation, in the U.S. But perform the procedure with a Canadian-made IUD and the price plunges to $224.

But, says the American FDA, they're not guaranteed by us to be reliable! Ah, respond those who would prefer the bargain, private corporate interests have brought government in to pound home their preference, limiting the consumer to the purchase of the inordinately costly product on the pretext that the alternative is inferior.

Oddly enough, the Canadian product happens to be manufactured in the same overseas factory as the American product; in other words, same product, different brand name. But, just think: if the foreign-produced-and-sold birth control devices truly were that unreliable, the end product would be a much-needed increase in the American birth rate.

So what's this debate about, anyway?

All the American nativists who decry the incursion of immigrants bringing with them values not commensurate with American ones, and who dilute the culture of the United States intolerably, could be influenced perhaps to procreate more generously, if they were given to understand the reality that the country must increase its population base to compete internationally as a growing workforce, and collect the appropriate taxes connected thereto for the purpose of providing vitally needed social services.

Like health care, like veterans' services, like old age pensions, like employment insurance - ad nauseum.