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Comment by nisa | Hacker News Reader

It's not about countries. It's about corporations.

The talks between Europe and the US (TTIP) are largely to remove barriers in legislation for corporations. E.g. new medication and chemicals can be sold in Europe/US if either passing FDA review or EU review.

This will save corporations millions of dollars. Wikipedia has a quite good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...

As a citizen of a country I'll doubt you'll have any benefits from it. People in Europe are worried (I think not without reason) that it will worsen safety regulations for consumers.

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If a corporation saves money bringing a drug to market you will save money buying that drug from them.

Or maybe they will just have higher margins than they already have?

[citation needed]

I doubt that will happen and think it's naive. If the corporation can still take the higher price (because of patents) it will take the price and make more profit.

Coincidently patents and intellectual property are also a big discussion point that is discussed there. Intellectual property rights will be tightened and likely generic medication will be more difficult to produce.

It means more drugs can be profitably be taken to market. This increases competition and lowers prices when multiple drugs can treat the same condition.

How does that increases competition? And you turn around the idea at at the end: you say it would be more profitable to make certain drugs, and then you say it would lower the prices , which will make (obviously) less profitable to make/sell those same drugs. So which one is it?

> How does that increases competition?

See the comment I already made: more drugs can be brought to the market because the cost is lower.

> you say it would be more profitable to make certain drugs, and then you say it would lower the prices , which will make (obviously) less profitable to make/sell those same drugs. So which one is it?

Lower production costs increases profits and price competition lowers profits (passing savings onto the consumer).

You're right if that's the only variable. Corporations love to be the only player, and tweak government to make sure they are. Normally without interference, they rarely have a monopoly for long.

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