Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17965

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

A bitter pill: Desperate people do desperate things.
Salt Lake Tribune 2003 Aug 11

Full text:

The price of life-sustaining prescription drugs has gotten so high for so many Americans that, while the government dithers, the marketplace has opened up a channel to Canada. Mail order and Internet connections to The Great White North bring essential medicines to your mailbox for up to 80 percent less than they cost at the neighborhood pharmacy.

Rather than address the underlying cause of this phenomenon — staggering prices — our nation’s pharmaceutical makers are going all out to prevent wholesalers and pharmacies from importing these same medicines on a much larger scale at, perhaps, even greater discounts. Because most of these medicines were invented and manufactured in the United States, shipping them to U.S. customers from distributors in Canada or the European Union is known as “reimportation.” Right now, it’s illegal for retailers and wholesalers to do that, supposedly because our Food and Drug Administration cannot vouch for the safety of such yo-yoed medicines. But the lure of sharply lower prices is too much to resist. A bill that would legalize reimportation of medicines passed the House last month by the vote of 243-186 — despite opposition from the Republican House leadership, the White House and, of course, the free-spending lobbyists for Big Pharma. The bill now moves to the Senate, where Utah’s Orrin Hatch is among its most outspoken opponents. Hatch argues, with cause, that such drugs might be contaminated, shorted, faked or even a means of terrorism. But they also might be the difference between a well-lived life and a poverty-stricken existence for individuals who need these drugs but cannot otherwise afford them. The Big Pharma argument is that government price controls overseas leave the U.S. market as the only place for drug-makers to recoup their huge research costs, and that threatening that revenue stream threatens the development of the next generation of wonder drugs. Fine. Except that the drug-makers’ cost of research and development is dwarfed by their marketing and lobbying budgets, money they lavish on everything from multi-page magazine ads to seminars for doctors in Maui and Vail, Colo. One popular answer to high drug prices, one that Big Pharma likes very much, is for Medicare to start picking up the tab. That is a reasonable idea — if it includes something to control the price. Otherwise, any federal drug benefit would shift the staggering cost to the taxpayers, until they couldn’t shoulder it any more, either. Drug reimportation is a shaky idea. It creates a long and insecure supply stream for a vital product. But unless Hatch and his colleagues take their courage pills and face down the price-gougers of Big Pharma, the market for reimported medicines will only grow, and be impossible for anyone to control.