Access to safe and affordable pharmaceuticals should be a natural right for all Americans. Yet there are incredible price discrepancies between brand name and generic pharmaceuticals around the globe. On average, Americans pay twice as much for prescription medicine as people in other industrialized countries. Why? Because big pharmaceutical companies engage in underhanded tactics like price fixing and censorship. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have gone to great lengths to protect the high prices of their products in America. RxRights has become increasingly aware of the price discrepancies of brand name and generic pharmaceuticals around the globe. Despite all of the benefits that the US scientific community, medical innovation and the world’s leading health care industry provides Americans, on average we pay twice as much for prescription medicine as most industrialized countries. For instance, pharmaceuticals in New Zealand can cost up to four times less than equivalent prescriptions in the US. Closer to home, Canadian pharmacies can offer the prescription drugs at prices up to 50 percent lower than their US counterparts.
Nexium is one of the top commonly prescribed medicines in the US. According to IMS Health, the world's leading provider of market intelligence to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, Nexium costs on average in the US $3.91 in the United States. The same dose and brand name pharmaceutical is less than $2.00 in Canada, less than $1.33 in the UK, Netherlands and France and costs around $1.00 in Germany and Australia.
*United States Senate Special Committee on Aging - Senator Kohl, March 17, 2010
Kohl Asks Drug Makers to Explain International Price Disparities