You are not mistaken. I did not see painkillers/narcotics OTC in other countries but did not look for them either. We routinely bought medications like antibiotics, inhalers, allergy meds, I recall buying Nexium, and other things that require an office visit + prescription + insurance claim over here. The Dr's we saw over the 3 years that we were there were on salary and what we saw is that they did not rush us through because they were incentivized to do a good job / keep us happy (we graded them and I saw one Dr sent packing) so they spent a little more time.
Do you realize by what percentage the costs would go down if we had access to common medications in the US? Granting the same access that canadians or Mexicans or Asians get would eliminate a high percentage of the visits anyway (but these tend to be the most profitable visits) leaving the healthcare system free to focus on major health issues and leaving our pocketbooks much heavier.
We could buy sudafed and clarinase and similar medications and you know why? Because if you buy it and then make and market illegal drugs from it and you get caught you get executed. That is the problem here as I find people to be generally the same everywhere and the worst of them will do whatever they think they can get away with little consequences with.
I do not think that as long as healthcare = profit that we can have a working public healthcare system. As long as insurance = profit (how in the world do we allow the insurance companies to pay out premiums to stockholders?) then we pay for the cost of healthcare + the cost of the skimmers and leeches who attach to the pool of money and suck off of it. Those skimmers and leeches are no, none, zero different from the skimmers and leeches who pay nothing and expect their healthcare to be free. Romney represents one set, and Obama represents the other.
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Originally Posted by AreYouReady?
If I'm not mistaken, I think Mexico has narcotics that can be sold OTC as well as other drugs.
We cannot even buy pseudofed OTC anymore because we have numbskulls and morons here in America that use it to make illegal drugs.
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