As debate intensifies over the cost of medicines, a new analysis found that prescription drug prices were on average 2.5 times more expensive in the U.S. than in 32 other countries. And that gap widened to 3.4 times costlier when looking specifically at brand-name medications.
At the same time, prices for generic drugs were slightly lower in the U.S. than in most other nations. Specifically, the U.S. spent an average of $0.84 cents for a generic that would have cost an average of $1 elsewhere, according to the report from RAND Corporation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization.
The upshot is Americans paid significantly more for medicines than people in 32 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental group that was created to stimulate economic progress and world trade. And brand-name drugs were the reason for the gaping differences, according to the study authors, who analyzed data for 30,000 drugs from 2018.
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