Posted on 01/28/2005 8:00:54 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
When Congress passed landmark Medicare reforms last year, critics opposed a provision banning Americans from buying "Canadian" prescription drugs and a study of the safety and cost benefits of cross border purchasing was mandated in the legislation.
For several years, healthcare policy analysts and health safety experts have produced a cacophony of powerful objections to importation based on worries about safety and pricing. Now adding to the din of serious concern comes this study from the Department of Health and Human Services produced by a respected, international expert panel that not only highlights the dangers of importation, but is likely to shift the tide of the debate.
"Safe Importation" is an oxymoron. It is impossible to achieve, and any politician claiming that importation can be safe knowingly speaks an untruth. The HHS report now gives them little room to wiggle and even fewer places to hide.
Released in mid-December, the report provides irrefutable evidence that banning what consumers believe are "Canadian" drugs protects Americans from harm. The report also dispels another vote-garnering argument proffered by pro-importation politicians by casting doubt that Canadian drugs are cheaper.
In analyzing the effects of legalizing importation from non-U.S. sources, a critical finding of the study echoes concerns of importation opponents that drugs purchased from "Canada" are often not, in fact, Canadian.
As many as 70% of Internet websites that have the appearance of being in Canada, aren't. They are not peddling U.S.-made drugs returned from Canada. Their drugs are produced in unsafe, unsanitary facilities in places such as India, the Dominican Republic and Pakistan. They are either minimally effective or outright counterfeits with no active ingredients.
And the American patient ordering from his computer has little chance of detecting that his drugs come from foreign manufacturers or criminal counterfeiters.
Demonstrating its own concerns, Health Canada refuses to vouch for the quality of drugs that flow through Canada to the U.S. Its position is that the country receiving foreign prescription drugs bears responsibility for the quality of those drugs. The Canadian Government echoes the concerns of its Health Department and goes even further, questioning whether or not to continue allowing Canadian pharmacies to export drugs to the U.S. at all.
Canadian officials recognize that the drug supply of some 30 million Canadians cannot possibly fill the needs of nearly 300 million Americans. It recognizes that this supply deficit is a gilded invitation for bad actors to ramp up counterfeit drug importation schemes.
The Canadian Health Minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, has repeatedly stated that Canada "cannot be the drugstore of the United States" and threatened to impose new regulations that would essentially bar the sales of actual Internet pharmacies by the end of January.
Legalizing importation would ensure that Americans take drugs from unknown sources for which nobody has taken responsibility. That, says the HHS report, is a prescription for disaster. "Many transactions," the report offers, "are occurring via poorly regulated and occasionally bogus Internet operations that have been documented ... to provide consumers with inferior products."
That prescription drugs from unverifiable sources are dangerous is no surprise. But few anticipated that the report would find that Canadian prescription drugs are not necessarily cheaper than their American counterparts.
"That most imported drugs are less expensive than American drugs is generally not true," the report states. It concluded that generic drugs, most widely used by Americans, are usually less expensive here in the U.S. and that lower prices can be found simply by shopping around or utilizing readily available prescription drug discount cards.
The study's authors contend that the enormous - and impossible - expense of screening imported drugs would more than offset any cost savings. "The public rightly expects that ... imported drugs [would] be safe and effective," they wrote. "Substantial resources would ... be needed to ensure adequate inspection of imported drug products."
The study raises yet another red flag for Americans seeking "Canadian" prescription drugs and confirms that there is no balance between safety and cost, no compromise appropriate. The U.S. has the safest drug supply in the world, and importing danger based on false cost concerns is simply not worth the risk.
HHS demonstrated once and for all that a Canadian drug cure-all is a hazardous myth. With such overwhelming evidence of the dangers inherent in legalizing importation, it is unconscionable that any politician would continue to play Russian roulette with the integrity of our medicine supply.
Bang?
We will just have to wait and see.
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Kerri Houston is Vice President of Policy for Frontiers of Freedom and Executive Director of its Project for the American Healthcare Century.
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
Now - assume that the entire universe bought drugs that were transshipped from Canada at those prices. What would happen? The ROI on capital invested in the pharmaceutical companies would fall as the revenue would drop below the cost research and development, litigation (in the US, primarily), patent defense, marketing, etc., etc., etc. Soon investment in the pharmaceutical industry would be curtailed and R&D would decline and....you get the picture.
About 25 years ago I worked in the retailing of photographic equipment - and grey market cameras were an issue. Large retailers (the late 47th St. Photo might be the best example) could purchase a container shipment of say, Minolta cameras in Paris and, depending on the currency exchange situation and the differential prices Minolta would sell cameras to distributors in deferent countries for, they could bring those cameras into the US and sell them at attractive prices and still make significant profits. Even after the cost of transshipment.
This is essentially analogous to the pharmaceutical conundrum re: Canada. However - one thing about pharmaceuticals is that 10 mg of Lipitor is 10 mg of Lipitor, no matter where it is dispensed in the world. In the camera industry - manufacturers combated the grey market transshipments by offering different warranty periods in different countries, by printing the manuals and packaging only in one language, and by having exclusive model names for the same product in different countries (an XD-11 marketed in the U.S. was labeled an XD-7 in France, for example). By the nature of pharmaceutical drugs - there is nothing you can do in this sense to differentiate.
The one thing you could do, which I see no evidence of the US drug manufacturers doing - is limit the number of units of any particular drug shipped into Canada to some rational level based on the composition of the Canadian population. If Canada has 28 million people, clearly they do not need 28 million annual dosages of Lipitor for example. Right now it seems as if the Canadian Rx operations that are transshipping back into the US can order unlimited quantities. That seems to be an incredibly stupid policy on the part of pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Even if it were persuasive, then the "remedy" is to allow imports if the drugs have "provenance," and better still to have the Torie plan most favored nation drug pricing law.
This is one issue, where I think I have it right, totally right. Anybody who does not think that this is an issue about not inconveniening drug companies business models as to which they are familiar, and why they are major contributors in the political public square to buy the necessary support for this scheme that is demonstrably not in the public interest, at a huge cost to American consumers, is simply ready to buy the Brooklyn bridge.
I have had personal experience with tainted drugs . . . my patients were harmed by them.
That is a flat-out, bold-faced lie, and the kind of tactic I would expect to find on DU.
So, all the drugs my relatives in the third world take are minimally effective or counterfeits? Bull Shit. Then why aren't the people dead who have diabetes or hypertension? I guess the drugs are effective enough.
I have taken two drugs manufactured in third-world countries, purchased by mail order. Both are the kinds of drugs that have an immediate, obvious effect if they are working. They WORK, and at a fifth the cost of a U.S. brand-name drug.
BTW, my wife was manufactured in a third-world country as well, and I am plenty happy with her.
Well stated!
Figures. Who supplies the pharmaceuticals in Mexico? You can buy them there in any store without a prescription.
== pharma industry shill. To summmarize the argument: Americans are too stupid to make choices in an open worldwide market for drugs; therefore, we have no option but to bend over and accept monopoly-administered fixed pricing.
To this I reply: they sent our jobs to India. Why don't consumers have the same right to shop worldwide?
There's no need to ban differential pricing when allowing free trade will do the job just as handily. Consumers will, acting by the unbribeable, unbreakable, uncooptable laws of economics, use arbitrage to break down the pricing differentials. When that happens we will find that, just as in the market for computer chips, the era of high-tech drug research and development will begin for real.
Let's see. I've drunk beer imported from Mexico. From India. From the Phillipines. From Sri Lanka. From Nigeria - ("Star Beer" - very dry, very good)
And I'm not dead yet.
Are we really supposed to believe that these countries can make safe beer but not safe aspirin? Give me a break.
Of course, I don't drink French beer. And maybe I should avoid Canadian.
Explains why Diclectin (pregnancy nausea reliever) is still unavailable in America - a great prescription drug made in Quebec. Predictably, this article is full of hot air.
Not when the government monopsony buyers don't resell.
That's because the manufacturers are making money on all of these sales. Canada bargains down prices by offering to buy large quantities at a given low price. No drug manufacturer is forced to sell to the Canadians at any price; if they feel the offered price is too low, which for over half the American drugs offered they do, manufacturers just refuse to sell. Drugs they do sell to Canadians, they make money on, even when Americans buy through Canada over the Internet. Naturally, the manfacturers would like to be able to force Americans to keep paying the old high prices, and to promote this they will keep on paying columnists like the above to plead their case to the public.
To comment on pharmaceutical drugs. The drug industry lobby each member on Congress more than any other industry. Believe me some of these drugs are not needed to maintain health. Take hypertension medication. The old rule of thumb was that your systolic (top number) was 100 + your age. So if you are 50 years old anything 150 or below was acceptable. Now with documents supplied by drug companies they say the top number must be no higher than 120. If somebody can find me trials not sponsored by these crooks, let me know. I will stick by the old rule.
There is much less profit in adulterating cabbages or green peppers than in selling adulterated Viagra or Zoloft...
Full Disclosure: Leave the Clinton and Michael Jackson jokes out of it.
True, but if there is a bad drug reaction, you will probably not be able to sue your canandian pharmacist, but you can sue your US pharmacist. Plus, the office rent in Canada may be a lot cheaper than in NYC for example. Also, the canadian labor may be cheaper than US labor. These are a few reasons why Canadian lipitor may be naturally cheaper than US lipitor.
In the old days of telecom, it was a lot cheaper to call europe from the US than the other way round. This was because the Euro telephone cos. were govt. owned monopolies and they liked to stick to people calling the US to pay for inflated euro govt.
Then someone thought up the idea of ring back, where to save money on a europe to US call, you would call a US designated number, ring it once, hang up and a call would then "ring back" from the US to your phone in Europe with a US dial tone, you could then place your call "from Europe" while paying US rates.
This is sort of what happens in drug reimportation.
The European govt. telephone monopolies eventually went away and I hope the same will happen with the drug companies.
This should make them cheaper.
absolutely correct. Please read post 58 too.
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