CANADIAN DRUGS AREN'T THE CURE

From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 08/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 03:40:28 GMT

Canadian drugs aren't the cure

By Robert Kuttner
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, August 18, 2004

There is something quite lunatic about the entire debate
on whether to permit imports of drugs from Canada. It's
not as if Canada manufactures drugs more cheaply. Nor are
drugs like trees, or bauxite, or hydro power, which just
happen to be naturally plentiful in Canada.

No, the cheaper Canadian drugs are the same ones sold at
higher prices in the United States, and either exported
or licensed for manufacture in Canada.

Why are they cheaper up north? Because Canada has a
policy of controlling drug prices through its national
health insurance system. As Deborah Stone, a health
policy expert at Dartmouth, has observed, it's not the
drugs we should be importing, it's the policy.

But the pharmaceutical lobby has so much power in the
United States that cheaper drug prices are off the
political radar screen. In fact, the recent Medicare bill
pushed through Congress by the Bush administration
explicitly prohibits Medicare, the largest bulk purchaser
of pharmaceutical drugs, from negotiating cut-rate bulk
prices. A consequence of these sky-high drug prices is
that seniors who elect to take the new Medicare drug
coverage must pay thousands of dollars out of pocket each
year before the coverage fully kicks in. (Senator Kerry,
to his credit, would reverse this policy.)

Instead of debating head-on whether the United States
should have a national health program like Canada's, or
at least controlled drug prices, the news media have
generally accepted the nonsensical premise that the
battle is about imports and that the issue is the safety
of drugs from Canada. This is the drug industry line, and
it's a complete red herring. In fact, there is no
documented case of an American getting sick because of
tainted or adulterated drugs brought in from Canada. On
the contrary, Canadian safety standards are at least as
strict as our own. But Bush appointees at the FDA, as a
service to their allies in the pharmaceutical industry,
have tried to make the public focus on safety. Why?
Because if drug imports from Canada became widespread,
the domestic structure of drug overpricing would
collapse. Everyone would buy from Canada.

If the administration were not hostile to the idea of
drug imports or cheaper drug prices, it would be easy to
set up safety spot checks. Indeed, in areas where the
administration promotes free trade, it satisfies its
safety concerns with spot checks of raw agricultural
products imported from countries whose rudimentary
sanitary standards are far less sophisticated than
Canada's. To add insult to injury, the administration is
actually pressing America's trading partners who have
lower drug prices to raise those prices so that our high
prices won't stick out like a sore thumb and tempt
Americans to seek cheaper drugs from abroad.

The drug industry and its friends in the administration
contend that the exorbitant prices are necessary to pay
for research. You've probably seen the TV ads in which an
idealistic research scientist at a drug company vows to
find a cure for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, mentioning in
passing that it costs $800 million to "bring a new drug
to market."

But as author Merrill Goozner documents in his book, "The
$800 Million Pill," much of the money attributed to
"research" goes to advertising and copy-cat drugs rather
than true breakthroughs, and much of the actual research
is financed by taxpayers through the National Institutes
of Health). Economist Dean Baker has calculated that only
about one dollar in five that US consumers spend on
inflated drug prices go to finance drug research. Baker
adds up all the money contributed by taxpayers to drug
companies through Medicare, Medicare, the Veterans
Administration, and NIH. He concludes that it would be
more cost-effective to pay for all drug research through
government grants and then put the results in the public
domain. Manufacturers, as in the case of aspirin,
doxycycline, and other off-patent drugs, would then earn
only a normal profit, and all drugs would be far cheaper.

Scientists would still innovate. The pioneers of
antibiotics weren't in it to get rich. Nor was Dr. Jonas
Salk. Their breakthroughs quickly went into the public
domain to help the greatest number at the lowest cost.

It's charming that the Republican governor of New
Hampshire, Craig Benson, is suing the FDA to allow
Canadian pharmacies to fill US prescriptions and that
congressmen of both parties have sponsored bills to
legalize imports. But these worthies are fighting the
wrong fight and ducking the real one. Forget Canada. We
need a national policy to lower drug prices right here in
the USA.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His
column appears regularly in the Globe.

More at:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/08/18/canadian_drugs_arent_the_cure/

End of forwarded message

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     "And a man's foes shall be they of his own
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 - Matthew 10:34-36.

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