You mean those “big businesses” that have a payroll of about $250,000? That's what the bill says. When Obama said he wanted to help the “mom and pop” businesses, he meant that literally. As long as they don't hire the uncle and a few cousins. Then they would qualify as a big evil business.

“The Senate Health Committee is giving the biotech industry monopoly protection against competition from generic drugs for 12 years after they go on the market. No wonder the cost of reform keeps going up and up and up.”

You mean that same patent laws that have existed since the start of our country, and our essential to driving innovation by insuring that inventors can profit from their work?

The reason drug prices are cheaper in Canada is because they have price controls. Drugs are expensive to develop, but cheap to manufacture once they have been developed. So, drug companies have to recoup their costs somehow. They do so by adding the R&D costs to the drugs. This makes perfect sense in a free market system. However, since Canada caps how much drugs can cost, the drug companies have to sell them for cheaper there. They are willing to do so because they still make more than it costs to manufacture the drugs, and can recoup the R&D costs by selling to American consumers for more. In effect, Canada piggy-backs on the American system in order to get cheap drugs, without having to pay the cost to develop those drugs.

If Americans were allowed to buy cheap drugs from Canada, drug companies would not be able to recoup the cost of R&D, and therefore there would be less innovation in drug development.

Here's a link to a better description of the problem: http://www.slate.com/id/1005389/

I would support regulation that forces drug companies based in the US to charge the same amount, no matter where the sell the product. Drug companies would then have to choose between two things:

1) Reduce the cost of drugs to US consumers.
2) Stop selling to Canada.

In reality, it would probably be a mix of those things. The drug companies would be more resistant to selling to Canada, which means there would be pressure on Canada to loosen its price controls. At the same time the price in the US would fall since drug companies would still make an effort to sell their products to other countries that have more reasonable price controls. The only problem with that is poor countries that need drugs but can't afford what Americans pay. Maybe we can make an exception in those cases, but only on the condition that those drugs are not imported back into the US.

Way to stand up for capitalist values, capitalists.