18 December 2004
Making it harder
Wll the federal government please stop making it harder for Vermonters to afford prescription drugs?
Last week, the Bush administration asked a federal judge to dismiss Vermont's lawsuit that seeks to overturn the federal ban on importing prescription drugs from Canada. Vermont was forced to file the suit because the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve our pilot program to allow 20,000 state employees, retirees and their families to buy prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies. Our northern neighbors pay between 20 and 75 percent less for certain name-brand medicines.
The administration's request for dismissal is the most recent example of a health policy that has forgotten its primary mission -- giving Americans the best health care at the lowest possible cost.
Instead, that policy seems to be geared more towards protecting the pharmaceutical industry. The drug companies adamantly oppose the idea of Americans buying their drugs in Canada, and the federal government has so far sided with them.
The industry warns, vaguely and darkly, that the quality of drugs from Canada cannot be guaranteed, with the unstated message that we can't trust the imports. Nonsense. We haven't seen news reports of Canadians dropping dead in the streets after taking the same drugs that are sold in the U.S.
It's also a bit presumptuous of the manufacturers to talk about safety when their own track record is less than perfect. Drugmaker Merck was forced to pull Vioxx, an aggressively-marketed and highly-profitable arthritis drug, from the market in September because independent researchers reported it might have caused more than 25,000 people to die of heart attacks and strokes.
The administration was supposed to release a report this week on safety issues around importing drugs, but they missed that deadline. Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has said the report will not be made public until he returns from a trip to Europe, where prescription drugs are also less expensive than they are here. Meanwhile, the U.S. is importing a flu vaccine from Germany, a vaccine that has not been licensed for use in this country.
Drugmakers often claim they need the large profits they're making on the drugs sold in this country to finance all the research and development that goes into making new drugs. We're frankly skeptical about this one, too. The industry spends far more on marketing and advertising than it does on R&D, and a sizeable share of R&D investment actually comes from the taxpayers, in the form of public support for research through government grants. In other contexts, this would be known as a subsidy.
Soaring prescription drug prices hurt Americans as consumers and as taxpayers. When President Bush signs a Medicare reform bill that specifically prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, that means taxpayers are picking up an inflated tab for an important health care program.
When Vermont's Medicaid programs, which face a projected $70 million deficit in the next fiscal year, spend more than $120 million a year on prescription drugs, it would stand to reason that lowering drug costs would reduce that deficit.
Since prescription drugs represent such a large portion of health care spending, it makes sense to think reducing the cost of the drugs would be a good first step towards reducing health care costs over all. Importing drugs from Canada is hardly the final answer towards reducing costs, but it would help. Washington often talks about how the states are the best laboratories for public policy. Let's apply that philosophy here. There is no good reason for the administration to stand in the way of Vermont's experiment with lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
A New York Times Editorial
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