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Medications have been going up in price for years now, and many people have no choice but to keep paying for them. We are living longer lives in the United States and senior citizens are relying on prescription drugs to keep them healthy. Drugs today focus on treating various problems, but not on curing them. If we as a country want to continue to this cycle, we can expect that drug prices will keep going up and more people will need more of them to live healthy. As we age we are more prone to have health problems in our lives and there is no cure for aging. There is a delicate balance that needs to be maintained between supply and demand for medical advancement and consumer prices. Drug companies spend billions of dollars on medical research and it takes years for these drugs to be approved by the FDA. Once they are approved, the pharmaceutical company that created the drug gets to patent it for a limited amount of time. They charge inflated prices during this time to recover the capital spent to develop the drugs and to start researching and developing new drugs for the future. Without the ability to recover this money, drug advancement would grind to a halt. Once the patent expires, the drugs are reproduced by generic companies for a fraction of the cost and they become more affordable to the general public. One way that people in the United States have been dealing with the high price of new drugs is to buy them from Canada and Mexico. The government is usually opposed to doing this because the FDA has no say in how Canadian drugs are produced or how safe they are. Most people have the idea that you can get these medications from across the border for a significant discount, but the average price difference for these drugs is less than 5%. If you buy your prescriptions from another country and you get something that hurts you instead of helping you, then you have no way to hold them responsible. All of these negative points make it hard to say that importing your medications is a good idea, but many people do it anyway. To deal with the cost of medications in the United States, we have created many different prescription plans. Some are from the private sector, like private health insurance that includes drug benefits. Some are from the government in the form of Medicare and Medicaid for lower income families and seniors. Still others are discount plans from private companies like Ameriplan that offer discount prices on prescriptions to its members. You can also get a prescription plan directly from most pharmacies you get your medications from. The big problem with prescription plans is that they all have different prices for different drugs and people that have many prescriptions end up needing several plans to meet their needs. As a nation, we have a great healthcare system that has doubled our life expectancy over the last 100 years, but it’s become too expensive. Compared with other countries, ours costs the most. Importing your prescription drugs can help to bring down your expenses, but not by much, and the upside doesn’t outweigh the risk. We have become dependant on our healthcare system and our need continues to increase as we live longer. Many years ago if you went to the doctor with a problem, you were given a checkup and a couple pills and everything was right in the world. Now if you go to the doctor with a problem, you get a checkup and a couple pills you need to take for the rest of your life. If we can switch our focus back to fixing health problems rather than just treating them, the world can be right once again!
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