Healthy Skepticism Library item: 247

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Publication type: news

Rovner J .
Thompson Might Back Drug Reimportation - If Restricted
CongressDaily 2004 Mar 5

Full text:

HHS Secretary Thompson, under bipartisan criticism at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, said today he could support allowing drugs to be reimported from Canada if Congress put strict conditions on the practice. If imports were restricted to Canada, to facilities that have been certified as having good manufacturing practices “and you allow us the resources to inspect the manufacturing and inspect the packages, then we can do it,” Thompson told the Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee.

Republicans and Democrats lectured Thompson for his opposition to allowing drug reimportation. “I haven’t seen a whole lot of people dying in Canada from mislabeled drugs,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho. Rep. Anne Northup, R-Ky., suggested that when Thompson was lobbying the Medicare bill the night it passed last November, he said the bill would give him authority to allow reimportation from Canada — which Thompson denied having said. Northup also criticized the appointment of FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan, who opposes reimportation, to head a panel studying whether reimportation could be done safety. “It’s a stacked jury,” she said. Thompson defended the choice of McClellan, who has been nominated to take over the agency that oversees Medicare, and promised that the panel would be “a fair and balanced one” and would hold its first hearing with proponents of the practice. He also turned the tables on the subcommittee on the reimportation question. “I cannot certify that all drugs coming in [from other countries] are safe,” he said, which the Medicare law continues to require. “I’m telling you what the law is, and the law can be changed,” he added.

Thompson declined to take a position on the propriety of the Justice Department’s request for the medical records of hundreds of women who have had abortions as part of a case to test the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. In December, Justice Department lawyers sought records from five hospitals in a suit in New York, and last week subpoenas were served at six Planned Parenthood affiliates as part of a separate suit filed in San Francisco.

“When I read this was happening, I thought I was living in a different world,” said Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., who noted that Thompson had long boasted about his department’s regulations seeking to guarantee the confidentiality of private medical information. Thompson said HHS lawyers had been in touch with the Justice Department, but that he had not yet heard back from them. And while he has been outspoken on the issue of medical privacy in general, he said: “This is a different matter. This is in the courts. It’s up to the courts to determine if records are going to be subpoenable.” Lowey said she was very disappointed Thompson did not “feel a moral responsibility to speak out on this issue.”