PER 2015
is likely to be unreasonable and immoral for them to use inflation as a reason for them to charge a high price for the drugs with cheap manufacturing cost.
In terms of the high import tax charged for these generic drugs in certain countries, these government will indeed provide a better healthcare system such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Most of the funding is paid by the government and the tax revenue is the major income of the government. Therefore, most of the tax charged from these imports will be used as the government expenditure for the healthcare to pay for most of the drug fees of the patients. As a result, it is likely for these generic drugs producers to have their money paid for the import tax receiving as the sales revenue in the foreign countries and a number of people under the healthcare system will still need to pay for the drug fees, so in fact these producers will less likely to suffer an overall loss and with a potential sales profit as the demand for these generic drugs are likely to be in higher demand in the foreign developed countries. In addition, there will be some people trying to buy drugs at a lower price from one place and sell it to other place with higher price. ‘There are risks to so-called “tiered pricing”. People may buy drugs in low-price countries and sell them at a profit in high-price ones.’ 8 The generic drug producers will definitely unwilling to share their profits with the others and under the market economy without government intervention, the only way for them to protect their profits is setting a relatively high selling price. Nevertheless, this situation is just rarely happen and the government can intervene in the market such as setting laws to protect the interest of the generic drug producers. In contrast, the public should also take up some of the responsibilities in this issue in terms of the ways that they consume the drugs. Nowadays, people are more likely to abuse the use of some drugs and the more the drugs used will provide an environment favourable to the growth of the bacteria which have resistance to that drug, so that the drug will be less effective to combat that type of bacteria which causes disease. As a result, more of the bacteria with more resistance to different type of drugs and a new drug will need to be invented. However, the process of inventing a new drug is a long process and it needs lots of money to spend on R&D, so that the cost of production will have more uncertainties during a long period with a motive to encourage the
8 ibid
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