Drugs from Canada

There was an story in the news about how Glaxo was putting its foot down on drug reimports from Canada. I ran into someone with a ton of pharma/biotech/VC experience the other day, and asked her what she thought of it. She said that the way Canadian drug reimports had traditionally worked, was that pharmas would sell them drugs at list price, and the government would then subsidies them to lower their cost to consumers (but of course, consumers also paid the subsidy through taxes). If Americans bought drugs from Canada, then Canadian tax payers were simply subsidizing American drug consumers, the pharmas did not care.

For Glaxo to put its foot down means that something in the above must have changed.