Made In China –
May 15, 2018 – “The moment people find out that these products largely come from China and India, they want to know why they’re not cheaper,” he told me. “The industry’s motivation in hiding this is to maintain very high prices.” On Friday, President Trump outlined steps he said would result in lower drug prices. “Under this administration,” Trump declared, “we are putting American patients first.” In fact, the measures he presented were so half-hearted that the stocks of major drug companies immediately went higher. Peter Magnusson, an associate professor of international business at the University of Alabama, said research clearly shows that consumers are influenced by labels that disclose a product’s origins.
If presented with an American-made and a Chinese-made version of the same drug, he said, most U.S. consumers wouldn’t hesitate to select the American pill. Rightly or wrongly, Magnusson said, “consumers trust rich-country stuff more than they trust developing-country stuff.” I wrote on Friday about a highly deceptive campaign from the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a U.S. drug-industry-backed group that seeks to prevent Americans from importing cheaper meds from abroad. The organization has come out with ads that misleadingly claim Canada is an untrustworthy source of drugs, with some meds containing “antifreeze, drywall, even road paint.”
