PRICE OF DRUGS

A federal Health and Human Services task force demonstrated in a report recently that if the nation spends enough money to regulate the flow of imported prescription drugs the incentive of cost savings can be all but removed from what are now substantially less expensive medications. What it did not prove was that the spending was justified, which explains why so many lawmakers and advocates of importing drugs saw the study as an excuse for keeping imported drugs out of the hands of U.S. consumers.

As the task force acknowledges, about 12 million prescriptions from Canada alone entered the United States in 2003, worth about $700 million. The Canadian drugs, representing nearly half of all imports, arrived through Internet sales or by Americans traveling to Canada to purchase the drugs. As import advocates acknowledge, the potential for Internet drug sites to sell counterfeit drugs and the lack of oversight on administering and using drugs in combination presents at least a theoretical danger.

But with so many drugs being sold and such a threat being so forcefully described by the task force the question becomes, “Where are the bodies?” This isn’t to wish illness on anyone, but millions of Americans are saving money every month by getting their drugs from countries that negotiate drug prices. This, the task force says, raises “significant risk.” With millions of experiences and so much risk, there ought to be some awful result apparent, and not just an awful result equal to those that occur with U.S.-produced drugs from botched prescriptions or faked or mislabeled drugs produced here but a statistically significant worse result from imported drugs.

Any amount of money can be spent on regulation and oversight -how many government inspectors are needed to test what proper percentage of, say, automobile tires or food? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that food-borne pathogens are responsible for about 76 million illnesses annually in the United States, causing 323,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. Anyone care to dun the U.S. food industries for these costs and for setting up a safety system to eliminate them? Of course not, these are accepted risks. The task force recommends spending and passing along to drug customers hundreds of millions of dollars for security, but it could justify any amount to reduce risk.

“The only thing endangered by allowing Americans access to lower-priced FDA-approved medicines from abroad is the incredibly large profits of the drug companies who over-price their medicines in our market, just because they can,” said Democratic Sen. Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota. He is an author of legislation to allow re-importation from Canada and 19 other countries. His co-author is Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, who said, “The greatest remaining risk to Americans – and one not included in the key findings of the report – is that if Americans cannot afford to fill prescriptions, the benefits of medications are lost.”

That is the crucial point: Americans now take the illegal route of drug importation to save money on their drugs. If the federal government builds a safety system so expensive that it raises the price of these drugs to that of legal drugs, consumers will look elsewhere and not much would be accomplished.

The price of prescription drugs is being established, however artificially, in the world market. Given the increased use and need for these drugs but Americans’ limited income for them, that’s the price many people will pay, no matter the risk.