Let us speak plainly: the pharmaceutical industry has become a grotesque theatre of the absurd, and the latest act unfolds along the 49th parallel. While our American cousins, shackled to a system that treats healthcare as a luxury good, seethe with envy, Canada has secured a deal for Ozempic at a fraction of the U.S.
price. The British observer, ever the detached classicist, might recall Gibbon’s observation that ‘the history of empires is the history of human folly.’ Here, the folly is in the pricing of a drug that could prevent diabetes complications, yet is priced out of reach for millions.
Canada’s victory is not a triumph of socialism, as the pundits might claim; it is simply the result of a government that remembers what the word ‘negotiation’ means. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, watches from the sidelines, a passive spectator in a debate that should be our own. We have the NHS, yes, but we also have a creeping Americanisation of our pharmaceutical costs, a quiet erosion of the principle that health should not be a commodity.
The deepening rift is not between nations but between the values we pretend to hold and the markets we allow to dictate our lives.
