I received the following message the other day from one of our blog’s readers, Susanna Brooks:

I cannot believe that I cannot buy drugs in Canada (with a prescription). It’s been the only way that I can get some of the medications that I need that are ungodly expensive in the United States. I will work to vote against any Senator/Congressman that votes against the Canadian medications being sold/deliver in the U.S.A.!!

Sharing Susanna’s Sentiments

I know for a fact that tens of millions of people share Susanna’s sentiments. Surveys show that up to 80 percent of Americans agree that we should be able to buy prescription drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies. So why aren’t the American people (officially, at least) allowed to do so?

As readers of this blog know, we’ve been covering the progress of proposed legislation on drug reimportation — allowing Americans to buy drugs from Canada — for some time now. The issue first bubbled to the surface in the late 90s, as the Internet made it easy for Americans to access Canadian pharmacies, enabling them to buy drugs for up to 80 percent less than at domestic drugstores.

Drug companies have tried everything to prevent this kind of free trade from happening. They’ve threatened to cut off supplies to Canadian drugstores that sold to Americans. They’ve tried to link Canadian drugstores to terrorism. And currently, they’re spending a lot of money with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and other “independent” groups to spread lies about the safety of licensed Canadian pharmacies.

But ultimately, Big Pharma’s most effective weapons against American consumers have been our own representatives in Congress and the White House. Thanks to the more than $1 billion that Big Pharma has paid out in Washington in the past decade, these politicians are really not our representatives at all. They’re Big Pharma’s representatives.

Surely, it’s been a tricky proposition for the politicians — opposing something that the American people overwhelmingly support. And how they’ve handled it over the past decade has been a dishonest, double-dealing mess.

How It All Started

Let’s take a look back:

It all started with “Slick Willie” — Bill Clinton. Both Clinton and his Republican Congress knew that Americans wanted legal reimportation. But they worked together (thanks to bags of money from Big Pharma) to give us a classic bait and switch.

Clinton, who publicly stated his support for reimportation, signed the Medicine Equity and Drug Safety Act into law on October 28, 2000, which supposedly made it legal. But the law contained huge loopholes that rendered it meaningless. One of these was to require Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to certify that the law would “pose no additional risk to public health and safety” and “significantly lower the cost of prescription drugs.” Shalala refused to do this, and the law became moot.

Then Bush won the 2000 election. Bush, like Clinton, was an avowed supporter of reimportation — at least during the campaign. He said reimportation “makes sense” as a way to provide a “helping hand” to the elderly.

After the election, Bush withdrew that helping hand, going silent on the issue. Members of Congress, spurred on by angry constituents, re-introduced reimportation legislation and, once again, it passed both houses of Congress. But again, it died.

In 2008, both Obama and McCain were vocal supporters of reimportation. Obama presented it as a main plank in his healthcare plan.

In anticipation of the new president’s support, bills to allow Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada were introduced in both the House and the Senate this spring. But now it looks like this proposed legislation will not even be brought to a vote.

Obama’s Backroom Deal

Why? Because Obama cut a backroom deal with Big Pharma, agreeing not to support reimportation if the pharmaceutical industry agreed not to fight Obama’s other planned health reforms.

And that’s the sad, sordid history of how a public policy that in the past 10 years has been supported (during campaigns) by:

• Bill Clinton;
• Al Gore;
• George W. Bush;
• John Kerry;
• John McCain; and
• Barack Obama

has still not become law in the United States.

Can you think of a single other policy that every president or party candidate for an entire decade has supported — and yet, somehow, has never become law?

I can’t.

As a reader of this blog, I’m guessing you may agree with the sentiments of our frustrated reader, Susanna Brooks. But my question is, how many of you care enough about this issue to do something about it?

Are you willing to write the FDA? Call your Congressman? Send a letter to the White House?

If so, now is the time to do it. Because once healthcare legislation is passed (in all likelihood) in the fall, drug reimportation could be a forgotten issue for years to come.

Source

We’re written before about U.S. Senator David Vitter’s quixotic fight to legalize the purchase of Canadian drugs by Americans — long after the battle over reimportation has been lost in a thick haze of Big Pharma backroom bargaining with the White House.

Last week, Vitter — a Republican — took some heat from liberals by explaining at a town hall meeting that he hoped to de-stabilize pricing in Canada and other countries with “socialized medicine” by legalizing reimportation.

The Daily Kos ripped Vitter, saying:

His reason for supporting re-importation is solely predicated on the notion that if enough Americans partake, it might wreck Canada’s system … Despite the lack of plausibility in his “logic”, Vitter now claims the clubhouse lead for worst rationale for a policy position ever.

No, not exactly.

What Vitter is really talking about is using the global free market to rationalize prices worldwide. And to that I say, Amen!

As Vitter explains:

I believe re-importation will cause the pricing system world-wide that the big drug companies exploit to collapse. Right now the big drug companies are able to charge very different prices in different countries, and of course we pay the highest price of all. If they did that, like they do now, but then we can write off to Canada, and pass certain safety provisions, and get drugs from there – guess what? That system implodes. That system can’t survive. So my ultimate goal, in terms of re-importation, is causing that system to collapse, so there’s a true, world-wide price for a drug. And that might – wouldn’t might – that would increase the cost in Canada, that would dramatically decrease the cost in the US.

Sounds good to me. How about you?

Some analysts say that if drug reimportation were legalized and it led to a run on Canadian pharmacies by Americans, the Canadian government would simply restrict supplies of exports so as not to distort its pricing system.

I’m not sure exactly how things would unfold. But the most important consequence would be that the cat would be out of the bag, once and for all, on prescription drug prices. Once Americans were legally able to buy drugs at the much-lower prices charged in every other industrialized nation, they would never go back to accepting the outrageous prices that drug companies are allowed to charge in the United States.

Would prices in Canada rise, as Vitter suggests? It’s possible, I suppose. But frankly, I doubt it.

Guess what? Drug companies sell their drugs in Canada because they make money doing it. It’s not charity work. If Canada’s so-called “price controls” prevented Big Pharma from making a profit, they would simply pull out of the Canadian market.

The reality is, the prices that Canadians (and Europeans, Australians, Japanese, etc.) pay for their medications are enough to keep the pharmaceutical industry fat and happy.

I think the only real impact of a free global market in pharmaceuticals is that drug prices in the United States would drop by 25 to 40 percent — and would not continue to rise at three times the rate of inflation, as they’ve been doing for years.

And Big Pharma would do just fine. It would simply have to settle for something less than the 30 percent profit margins to which it has become accustomed.

When the winner in a Monday Night Football game became obvious in the fourth quarter, ’70s color commentator Don Meredith used to warble, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over, we know that all good things must end…”

I’m afraid it may be time to turn out the lights — perhaps forever — on legalized drug reimportation.

I hate to sound so dire, and I know that a small, bipartisan group of legislators, including Sen. David Vitter, is working hard to keep reimportation on the negotiating table as Congress prepares to pass sweeping healthcare reform legislation.

But I just don’t think the good guys are going to win this one. No matter what President Obama ends up signing into law on healthcare, I’m 95 percent sure it won’t include allowing American consumers to legally purchase prescription drugs from Canada.

It’s maddening when you think about it. Since reimportation became a public policy issue in the late 1990s, polls have consistently shown that between 70 and 80 percent of Americans want the right to buy from Canadian pharmacies.

Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George W. Bush, John Kerry, Ron Paul, John McCain and Obama (among others) have all spoken in favor of reimportation at various times (generally during their presidential campaigns). Congress has had a reimportation bill put before it virtually every session; it has even passed Congress before, only not to be implemented because of an administrative loophole in the legislation.

It’s the most blatant example of politicians willfully deflecting the desires of the American people I can think of in the past 20 years, if not longer.

I feel silly now that as recently as March, I was confident that this time would be different.

So, why is the will of the people being deferred again — and perhaps defeated once and for all?

As the Wall Street Journal put it in an article last week on proposed healthcare reform legislation:

Drug Makers Score Early Wins as Plan Takes Shape

The pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to “take on” during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul.

The final contours of the legislation are far from settled, but the industry, led by a onetime powerful congressman, has notched a string of victories. Legislation expected soon in the powerful Senate Finance Committee will leave out cost-cutting steps as part of an agreement with the industry and the White House, according to Congressional aides, industry lobbyists and others involved in the talks.

The missing items include two planks of Mr. Obama’s campaign platform: allowing cheaper drugs to be imported from Canada and giving the federal government the right to negotiate Medicare drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies…

“This is the best year the drug industry has had in decades,” said Nancy LeaMond of AARP, the seniors’ lobby, which is seeking greater price-cutting on drugs.

Why did Obama back down? It’s simple. Big Pharma has the money to potentially take down healthcare reform with national advertising and astroturf organizing, the way it did when the Clinton Administration tried reform in the early 1990s.

Obama decided to swallow some bitter pills in order to get broader reform legislation passed.

The decision is already paying off, as PhRMA, the Big Pharma lobby, is now financing an ad campaign in support of healthcare reform legislation. Per FiercePharma:

Harry and Louise are back. The actors who starred in the infamous anti-healthcare reform commercials back in the ’90s have gone turncoat, signing up for a new campaign in support of a healthcare revamp. Sponsoring the ads? None other than PhRMA … The $4 million campaign starts this weekend and runs for three weeks…

The NYT speculates that by funding it–and so publicly supporting the reform plans–drugmakers might garner even more political goodwill to add to their $80 billion cost-cutting deal with Sen. Max Baucus. And that goodwill has paid off, at least in the Senate, where the latest versions of healthcare reform leave out drug reimportation and Medicare price negotiation (as the Wall Street Journal reports).

So Big Pharma wins again — this time, by buying the opposing team.

Here’s how I now think things will shake out over the next year:

• Healthcare reform legislation will be passed.
• Because of “compromises” with Big Pharma and insurance companies, along with Congress’ inability to pass new taxes during a recession, the legislation will not pay for itself — not by a longshot.
• In the end, Obama will probably give up on the public insurance option, too — meaning that healthcare reform might look a lot like a bigger version of the Medicare Part D boondoggle passed during the Bush Administation.
• Americans will continue to purchase medications from Canadian pharmacies in the same way they do today, because they will still cost a lot less than what we pay here.

It pains me to make this prediction. In fact, I really hope I’m wrong. But I fear I’m not.