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Caught in a squeeze between the health needs of aging populations on one hand and the financial crisis on the other, governments

admin2014-06-30  39
问题     Caught in a squeeze between the health needs of aging populations on one hand and the financial crisis on the other, governments everywhere are looking for ways to slow the growth in health-care spending. Increasingly, they are looking to the generic-drugs(普通药物)industry as a savior. In November Japan’s finance ministry issued a report complaining that the country’s use of generics was less than a third of that in America or Britain. In the same month Canada’s competition watchdog criticized the country’s pharmacies for failing to pass on the savings made possible by the use of generic drugs. That greed, it reckoned, costs taxpayers nearly C$1 billion a year.
    Then on November 28th the European Commission issued the preliminary results of its year-long probe into drug giants in the European Union. The report reached a damning, though provisional, conclusion: the drugs firms use a variety of unfair strategies to protect their expensive drugs by delaying the entry of cheaper generic opponents. Though this initial report does not carry the force of law(a final report is due early next year), it has caused much controversy. Neelie Kroes, the EU’s competition commissioner, says she is ready to take legal action if the evidence allows.
    One strategy the investigators criticize is the use of the " patent cluster(专利群)". A firm keen to defend its drug due to go off-patent may file dozens or hundreds of new patents, often of dubious merit, to confuse and terrify potential copycats and maintain its monopoly. An unnamed drugs firm once took out 1, 300 patents across the EU on a single drug. The report also suggests that out-of-court settlements between makers of patented drugs and generics firms may be a strategy used by the former to delay market entry by the latter.
    According to EU officials, such misdeeds have delayed the arrival of generic competition and the accompanying savings. On average, the report estimates, generics arrived seven months after a patented drug lost its protection, though where the drug was a big seller the lag was four months. The report says taxpayers paid about ￠ 3 billion more than they would have had the generics gone on sale immediately.
    But hang on a minute. Though many of the charges of bad behavior leveled at the patented-drugs industry by EU investigators may well be true, the report seems to let the generics industry off the hook（钩子） too lightly. After all, if the drugs giants stand accused, in effect, of bribing opponents to delay the launch of cheap generics, shouldn’t the companies that accepted those "bribes" also share the blame?
Why are governments around the world seeking ways to reduce their health-care spending?
选项 A、They consider the generic-drugs industry as a savior.
B、They are under the double pressure of aging group and financial crisis.
C、Health-care spending has accounted too large proportion.
D、Health-care spending has cost taxpayers too much income.
答案B
解析 推理判断题。由定位句可知，各国政府一方面面临老龄化人群的健康需求，另一方面受到金融危机的影响，所以都在寻求减少医疗保健开支的途径，B)符合题意。第一段第二句提到they are looking to thegeneric-drugs industry as a savior，但是普通药物只是各国政府减少开支的一个方法，并不是他们这么做的原因，故排除A)；C)的说法在文中没有提及；本段最后一句提到That greed…costs taxpayers nearly C$1billion a year，这里是说药店的贪心导致纳税人受损，并不是说保健花费的问题，故排除D)。
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