Sorry, dumb question about prescription drugs...

[begin_within]

For all the prescription drugs which are non-patented, why doesn't the federal government set up its own manufacturing facility, and make the drugs, then give them free to Medicare recipients? Wouldn't that save the federal government a lot of money on the prescription drug benefit?

[rockymountaindem]

1. Yeah, but then the government would be involved in manufacturing

and we know that won't fly with a lot of influential people and groups.

Edit: my first attempt to make this statement was too convoluted.

[TZ]

2. Many of the manufacturing facilities for drugs

are no longer in this country-Europe and India and China. Manufacturing of biologics and drugs is not cheap nor easy. Alot of it involves high sterility/cleanliness. I have worked for both the government and private companies. I would not trust the government to run such a complex process. Government is good at doing R+D science of some sort, but when it comes to the strict processes necessary and the high skill sets needed to do this...It would be sooo expensive and I would worry about quality to some extent...this is a competetive field and the workers are highly paid. It would NOT save money, in fact it would be a HUGE expense....

[napi21]

3. Probably not. It's not a cheap facility to set up. And it's not cheap

to staff either. You still need chemists, formulators, lab techs to do the testing. The only thing you would be eliminating would be the researchers. All that coupled with the rest of the staff to check the incoming inventory, test it, run the equipemnt etc, would most likely not save enough to make that idea feasable.

[Lionel Mandrake]

4. That's not a good idea.

Market forces are effective for generic drugs, because there is no monopoly on them. As a medicare recipient, I can assure you that the prices of such drugs are reasonable. If the market isn't broken, don't fix it!

[stillcool]

5. I don't think those kind of savings

are in the government's best interest. The real job is to dole out tax dollars to their friends. I wonder who makes the anthrax...