Chellie Pingree’s Fair Pricing Board is a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to control the prescription drug market. This bill will not help the truly poor to get access to prescription drugs. A $50 prescription is just as far out of reach as a $75 prescription for someone truly indigent.

Drug companies have taken advantage of Mainers with high prescription drug prices. People with insurance coverage get an advantage and pay less than the uninsured — usually the people who can least afford it! We need to give everyone the market power to compete against these multinational corporations.

The main purpose of the Pingree bill is to “send a message.” Mark Lawrence thinks the bill will “fire a shot across the bow of the insurance industry.” Political brinkmanship is not an adequate reason to destroy the Maine pharmaceutical drug market.

I will limit myself to four reasons why this bill will not work:

1. The Fair Drug Price Board will only make Rite Aid rich. Parallel importing starts when regional price controls are implemented. Rite Aid will import all their drugs at a low price in Maine and sell them in Massachusetts. Maine’s pharmaceutical supplies will flow out of state.

2. Mainers will demand this bill rescinded. It already takes years for the Food and Drug Administration to approve a drug. How will Mainers feel when they have to wait another year for Maine’s government to reach a price agreement?

3. The drug board is too invasive. The Pingree bill gives the board the right to “subpoena witnesses and documents … on all matters over which the board has jurisdiction.” Pharmaceutical manufacturers are secretive about the development process.

4. How will the drug companies react to a small market to which they have no loyalty? Mike Howley Stetson