The United States is not a "civilized" nation.

Thus, the original air quotes.

They are just getting ready to produce generic viagra in 2020.

Hmm, I wonder if they will make their generics available to other hospital systems or limit their supply to just their own customers?

Either way this is good news. It's not, you know, what should happen - single payer health care with a remit to negotiate prices with drug companies. But it's a damn good work-around for rules banning Medicare/Medicaid from applying downward pressure on price.

Presumably they will make their drugs available to themselves for roughly the same price that separate drug companies charge, so that they receive the profits that currently go to those companies. I doubt this inititive would make much difference to the final bill.

I hope I'm wrong, but this is probably a stopgap measure so they can point and pretend the industry is capable of regulating itself.

I guess it depends on how they define, "not for profit." I'm sure they can always do accounting tricks to avoid profitability, but it would be hard to justify charging some of the sky-high prices we currently see. I'm imagining the lower price drugs as loss-leaders for other other services. Better to make a reasonable profit on a customer through other channels than to lose the customer all together.

According to wikipedia:
In 2003, of the roughly 3,900 nonfederal, short-term, acute care general hospitals in the United States, the majority—about 62 percent—were nonprofit. The rest included government hospitals (20 percent) and for-profit hospitals (18 percent). In exchange for tax-exemptions, estimated to total $12.6 billion in 2002, nonprofit hospitals are expected to provide community benefits.

So I don't know how much of a difference this will make to the consumer as far as price goes. It's kinda sounding like the difference between Republican's "access to healthcare" and the Leftist's "healthcare as a right."