Re:The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company
by TylerE on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @10:19PM
(#25937730)
They don’t make the drugs in Canada. They buy them in the open market, likely from us.
Re:The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company
by Scoundreller on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @10:50PM
(#25937920)
It's sort of the open market.
The history is that Canada used to have "compulsory licensing" for patented drugs. Anyone could manufacture a patented drug in Canada and pay a ?6?% or whatever royalty to the patent owner and they just had to deal with it.
Over the years, first 4, then 10 years of exclusivity were provided to the patent owner.
Then the WTO came along, and presently, everyone has agreed to ~20y exclusivity and charge/pay the median price of OECD countries before it's a royalty-free free-for-all.
http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb9946-e.h...
Canadian generic drugs today aren't usually cheaper than US generics, except where patent exclusivity mismatches.
Couldn't Canadian drug companies increase supply if the demand was there? In the short term, sure, they would not be able to handle our level of demand, but unless there's some constraint I'm not aware of they could always just scale up and make more animal insulin or whatever.