The higher cost of the transplant itself has been mentioned.

Well, the transportation cost will be gone and that was higher than
the med cost when it was imported except for those who brought in high
quantities.

I suspect that the reason the implant cost itself (minus
transportation) is higher in the U.S. may be that the U.S. branch needs
to make up for the years and years and years of legal costs to get it
okayed. Such costs in pharmaceutical companies often are tied to the
meds themselves once they are being sold and that pays back to the till
so that other meds can later be advanced.

For Suprelorin has been an extremely long process which began a long
time ago (and for a great many years only certain okayed researchers
could import it, not the treating vets, until the very recent years)
and it has not been at all a cheap one process to get the med okayed.

If my sense of time passed is not off then it began about 10 years ago
give or take two or three years -- at first with the expectation that
in about three or four years they'd be able to have it here. So, there
are about ten years of legal bills (instead of three) for the
medication to fiscally justify itself here in the U.S.

I do not know exactly why it took so long; perhaps it accidentally got
shelved despite legal costs in the earlier administration, or perhaps
the cuts those branches suffered in '02 -'07 meant that many things
had to be shelved which itself results in more legal costs to the
companies. (Branches like the FDA are administrative branches but
funded through Congress with the funds able to be withheld by the
Administration.)

Whatever the reason, the work to finally okay the med being sold here
in the U.S. did not happen till recent years despite the filing and
follow-up happening much, much earlier so there are a huge number of
legal bills for the med to pay back internally in Virbac since it will
have absorbed those costs when it bought Peptech. For whatever reason
in the last several years the work finally began at a normal pace in
the FDA to get this med okayed for direct sale in the U.S.

Sukie (not a vet) Ferrets make the world a game.

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
all ferret topics:
http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html

"All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow."
(2010, Steve Crandall)

A nation is as free as the least within it.

[Posted in FML 7569]