Legalize Rx-Drug Imports And Price Negotiation

[LiviaOlivia]

Miami Herald
Drug industry protected at taxpayer expense
OUR OPINION: LEGALIZE RX-DRUG IMPORTS AND PRICE NEGOTIATION
Jan 02, 2005

The irony in a recently released government report on prescription-drug imports would be laughable if the issue weren't so critical for millions of fixed-income seniors and chronically ill Americans dependent on increasingly costly drugs. The report puts down the idea of reimporting drugs by arguing that the hundreds of million of dollars needed to ensure drug safety would erode most savings to consumers. Yet there's no evidence that the 12 million prescription-drug products imported from Canada last year caused a safety risk, even as health problems appeared with FDA-approved drugs such as Vioxx and Celebrex.

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In truth, the recommendations of the Health and Human Services Task Force on Drug Importation must be taken with a grain of salt. The 13-member panel included people from government agencies that have long opposed reimportation, among them acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, Medicare Administrator Mark McClellan and representatives from the Justice Department, U.S. Customs and the Drug Enforcement Administration. While seven members were political appointees, no independent outside experts participated. No wonder their findings mimic the pharmaceutical industry's arguments against legalizing drug importation.

The task force concluded that, after regulation costs, U.S. drug-import buyers would save only 1 percent to 2 percent on drugs and that U.S. drug makers' loss of profits would dampen their spending on research for new drugs. Another report by the Commerce Department found that drug-price controls by other governments had curbed drug development abroad.

These reports, however, don't mention the nut of the problem: U.S. consumers subsidize the cost of prescription drugs for the rest of the world thanks to those price controls. Big Pharma, one of the nation's most profitable industries, wants the U.S. government to protect it from controls, competition and buying power and allow it to keep over-charging U.S. consumers. The industry spends huge sums lobbying in Washington to get what it wants. Such protection comes at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and our economy.

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