Importing Less Expensive Drugs Not Seen as Cure for U.S. Woes
By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: October 16, 2004
customer at the Concourse Drugs pharmacy in the Bronx will pay about $118 to get a month's supply of 20-milligram Lipitor pills. At PharmacyinCanada.com, a Canadian online outlet, the same quantity of the drug, Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering medication, costs $79.
The difference has become a tempting political target. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, has made a campaign pledge to help cut Americans' prescription drug costs by allowing them to import drugs from Canada. President Bush has conceded that the idea is worth a try "if there's a safe way to do it." Bipartisan legislation in Congress would allow the reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada and other industrialized countries.
It may make political sense to point to Canada as a solution to high prescription drug prices in the United States. But many economists and health care experts say that importing drugs from countries that control their prices would do little to solve the problem of expensive drugs in the United States, where companies are free to set their own prices. Even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that allowing Canadian drug imports would have a "negligible" impact on drug spending.
To begin with, there are not enough Canadians, or drugs in Canada, to make much of a dent in the United States. There are 16 million American patients on Lipitor, for instance - more than half the entire Canadian population.
Drug makers like Pfizer say they would reduce their shipments of drugs to distributors in Canada and other countries that re-export to the United States. "We are not going to supply drugs to diverters, in Canada or elsewhere," said Hank McKinnell, chairman and chief executive of Pfizer.
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What is needed is to level the playing field not the importation of drugs. We in the US should not be bearing the burden of being alone in paying for the R & D. And I might add advertisement. Isn't it time for congress to stop being advocates for the pharmaceutical industry and become advocates for the American public.