Asthma Drug Prices Illustrate Larger Problem

The Soaring Cost Of A Simple Breath by Elisabeth Rosenthal.  The New York Times.  October 12, 2013.

(1)  The United States spends ____________ per capita  on medicines than other developed countries even though Americans take ________ prescriptions than people in France or Canada.

(2)  True or False:  Americans us less generic medications than patients in other developed countries.

(3)  In 2012, generics increased in price and average of ____________ while brand-names medicines increased by more than ____________.

(4)  A surprising number of lifesaving drugs are made by only ______________.

(5)  Making a generic alternative  for asthma inhalers is made more difficult by ________ which are hard to skirt.

(6)  High prices are often buttressed by choosing to sell a medicine by ________________ rather than _______________________.

(7)  The amount of money spent by the pharmaceutical and health products industries is even more than the ______________ industry.

(8)  Lawmakers had forbidden Medicare to _____________ drug prices.

(9)  Since often asthma medicines are lifechange, the demand for them is _____________.

(10)  In most national health systems make sure that inhalers are __________ or ________.

(11)  Because of the difficulty in demonstrating _____________ before the FDA sprays, creams, patches, etc present more problems for generic manufacturers.  As a result there are ________ generic inhalers in the United States.

(12)  The U.S. Patent office grants new protections for slight modifications to drugs with weighing _____________.

(13)  Drugs companies spend more on _______________ than the 15-20% of revenues that they spend on research and development.

(14)  The focus on much pharmaceutical research in research years has shifted to complicated molecules that would benefit ___________ but carry ___________.

(15)  What are a couple of the tools governments in other developed countries use to insure that drug manufacturers sell their  products at affordable prices?

(16)  In France this year the price of Advair __________ but in the Bronx the price has ___________.

(17) Drugs sold only by prescription in the United States are often available __________ in other countries.