For the better part of a decade, I have been dealing with hyperthyroidism, a condition that has caused me to deal with a host of symptoms and take numerous different prescription medications.
Over the years, I have become more and more knowledgeable about how different medications affect my body and started to pay more attention to the regulatory environment surrounding pharmaceuticals.
What I have learned is that American pharmaceutical companies are far and away the world leaders in creating new medicines. And because of that, Americans have access to more than 90% of new treatments created in the past 10 years. To put that in context, Canadians only have access to about 50% of those same new treatments.
Our health care system is broken and needs to be fixed. Patients are paying way too much at the pharmacy, and the system lacks much-needed transparency. However, the answer simply cannot be allowing politicians to set the prices for medicines, like we see in Canada. Fixing one problem with another is not a solution.
I hope that our elected leaders will take a practical approach to the drug-pricing debate and find a real solution that doesn’t just create more problems.
Dan Walls
Wilmington
