This sort of rhetoric might work, but it doesn't in the face of Indian manufacturers who can easily be certified who will produce it for $1 and ship it to you the next day for $1 more. It's simply regulatory capture and a way of printing free money for people who already have money so they can rob the masses who don't. It's a scam, and it's stupid that we fall for it. The rich do get richer, and not for any other reason then they have money to affect regulatory capture. Generics should be nearly free. There is no reason for anyone to be making such large sized gains on generics.

This is why we don't want to import drugs from India:

Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid. Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. “Who cares?” he said, according to Spreen. “It’s just blacks dying.”[1]

[1]http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/05/17/a_l...

This link has some pretty hair-raisers: http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/search/label/warning%20letter...

Everyone loves to hate on the FDA until there's a compounding pharmacy that really messes up. A couple of years ago there was one that distributed some medication for injection that had a fungal contaminant, and there were several dozens of fatalities. You'd ask yourself what would happen without adult supervision.

This is the full story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Compounding_Center...

And yet somehow the US imports mind-boggling quantities of other things we put in our bodies at safety standards that appear to generate no controversy whatsoever.

That's why you don't want to import from India. I do personally for my medications. I'm willing to risk it for drastically lower costs.

One company is one company. There is no reason to think that India can not produce drugs up to par with the right financial and oversight incentive.

Take a look at home many Indian drug manufacturers have had import bans slapped on them by the FDA. It isn't just one company.

There are 74 US FDA-approved manufacturing facilities in India, more than in any other country outside the U.S. (This I believe has increased further over the last year)

The point being there are or is at least one Indian drug company that exports to the that is not been censured by the FDA.

What's stopping generics from being "nearly free" in the U.S.? Why do we need to import them from India?

> What's stopping generics from being "nearly free" in the U.S.? Why do we need to import them from India?

Pay-to-delay is a big one. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/mergers-comp...

Ranbaxy has been banned by the FDA for one thing or another for a long time now. Please use FDA approved Indian manufacturers. There are several dozens of them.

Sounds like textbook comparative advantage, and in any sane market, imports would be about as controversial as paint drying.

> Sounds like textbook comparative advantage, and in any sane market, imports would be about as controversial as paint drying.

This isn't comparative advantage, especially since we're often times talking about reimporting drugs (both brand-name and generics) that were manufactured in the US, but sold abroad for cheaper prices. The article doesn't make that very clear, and I wish it did, because it's an important distinction.

But your point is spot on - from a free market standpoint, this is a no-brainer. There is literally no reason to prevent US patients from buying drugs that were manufactured in the US from Canadian or European wholesalers. Except, of course, that this is a massive source of profit for pharmaceutical companies.

It may be a regulatory ("artificial") advantage, but I'd still count it as a comparative advantage.

> We know what to do in such a situation (turn the monopolist into a regulated utility), but the current political climate won't permit this action.

Or, guarantee single payer and become a monopsony, thus combating the monopoly effects with an opposite market force.