Articles > Online Prescriptions

Drug Price Equity a Must

The Bakersfield Californian
Tuesday July 15, 2003, 06:15:11 PM

As it has with telemarketing abuses and is starting to do with unwanted e-mail, the federal government must come to grips with the high cost of prescription drugs not covered by such public insurance programs as Medicare.

The Senate took one tiny step in the right direction recently, but it is one that by all accounts will be stopped in the House of Representatives or at the White House. The Senate voted to allow pharmacies and their wholesalers to order American drugs from Canadian distributors at lower prices than they can buy from domestic suppliers. They can then pass the savings onto individual consumers in the U.S.

U.S. drugs are usually sold overseas at deep discounts compared to their prices here. Most countries have government sponsored health insurance plans that are able to negotiate volume discounts from manufacturers. In addition, in many foreign countries, generic drugs come on the market much sooner than they are allowed to do in the U.S.

In Canada, American-branded and manufactured drugs can be bought routinely at discounts ranging from 35 percent to 70 percent.

American consumers pay higher prices for precisely the same drugs in order for manufacturers to make up the profit they lose discounting their products overseas.

The trend is getting worse, even without an aging population. The price pressure on private employers who subsidize employee drug benefits is causing premiums and co-payments to escalate and the number of covered drugs to decrease. Uninsured individuals have no recourse at all.

The law presently allows Americans to import up to a 90-day supply of drugs for personal use, a booming trade for Canadian pharmacies via Internet sales and by border state residents going to Canada for direct purchasing.

But the Senate's effort is different -- potentially making the process more convenient and available to everyone at their local pharmacy.

Even without that the pharmaceutical industry is fighting every effort to make price equity a reality. One company has promised to cut off supplies to Canadian distributors who sell its products to Americans via the Internet. And much of the rest of the industry is reported to have been pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to end the 90-day supply import rule.

There are a lot of red herrings in the debate, with manufacturers raising issues about quality, tampering and counterfeit drugs. But those sorts of manufacturing and distribution issues are handled routinely all the time.

The basic issue is bucks.

Because a nationwide consumer boycott would be almost impossible to organize and would be dangerous to health, Congress and the White House must make it a national policy that Americans not be forced to pay higher prices for drugs made by American companies than foreigners pay -- however companies can manage to do that.

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