Direct from Canada

Is there any other product but prescription drugs that inspires state legislators, governors and members of Congress to wage “Don’t Buy American” campaigns? Is there any question that the situation has passed through absurd to tragic when politicians regularly lead the legally dubious practice of taking busloads of seniors across the border to Canada to save money on medicine? But a disconnection between those bus-riding members of Congress and their leaders – and the leaders’ well-funded campaigns – is putting prescription drugs out of reach for more people than ever.

All four members of Maine’s congressional delegation support proposals to make it easier for Americans to travel to Canada, where prescription drugs are 30 to 70 percent less expensive, to buy medication. Currently, Americans who do so face the possibility of fines. Legislation to remove the possibility of a fine passed easily in the Senate earlier this summer and was overwhelmingly supported in the House as an amendment to the Agriculture Appropriations bill. The two versions of the proposal will soon be reconciled in conference.

While you’re waiting, however, you still can avoid a fine if you take the advice of Vermont’s governor, Howard Dean, a physician who last week joined the group United Health Alliance in describing how the alliance developed a program among its doctors to connect with pharmacies in Canada. The physicias fax orders for their patients; the pharmacy mails the prescriptions to the doctors’ offices, making the prescription no longer a prescription, but a doctor’s supply order. The loophole is apparently legal, though some might conclude it violates the spirit of the prohibition.

And if this arrangement seems too complicated for patients, the easier path is over the Internet, where Canadian companies offer to fill drug orders at prices guaranteed below U.S. retail prices. Maine’s recent decision to require drug companies to negotiate lower prices for people without drug coverage seems mild in comparison.

Mild, and yet heaps more sensible than telling Americans, as congressional leaders currently are doing, that negotiated prices for prescription drugs are not the answer, but they’ll support the nation buying drugs based on negotiated prices elsewhere. While few argue that the United States should adopt wholesale a Canadian-style health-care system – it shouldn’t, for a lot of reasons – there is no mistaking that U.S. citizens are subsidizing the pharmaceutical research for Canada and the rest of the world and they no longer can afford it. Negotiated prices in the United States will cause re-negotiated prices everywhere else, meaning that the relatively great deals in Canada, Mexico, Europe, etc., won’t be quite so great anymore.

The record-setting profits that drug companies have proudly shown their shareholders can go on and on. Just as long as they stop demanding that America’s uninsured pick up the largest share of the bill.