A renewed push in Congress to provide access to lower-cost prescription drugs in Canada arrives just as a couple of new studies emphasize the overall medical savings that costly drugs achieve. Combined, they put the debate over medicine back to where it began five years ago. But the question then and now is, why should U.S. consumers, appreciating the benefits they receive from new drugs, be expected to subsidize the rest of the world’s prescription costs?

The action in Congress comes as the Food and Drug Administration refuses to help put into effect a law passed last year that would allow drug stores and medical distributors to reimport U.S. drugs sold more cheaply in Canada. The FDA has expressed concerns over the safety of the reimported drugs, but has yet to devise a plan that would allow the idea to work. Many Maine residents and residents of other border states already use drugs from Canada and may properly wonder whether the FDA’s concerns, while no doubt real, aren’t also overstated.

While the FDA was being unhelpful in comments before Congress last week, an article in the journal Health Affairs and a report from health advisors to President Bush and former President Clinton conclude that new drugs, costly as they may be, actually save health care dollars by allowing patients to avoid even more expensive surgeries and follow-up treatment. They say the drugs take up an increasing portion of the health care budget because the drugs are more effective than earlier treatments and are more widely used. For instance, according to the presidential advisors, $7 was gained for every $1 spent on improved treatment for heart attack victims compared with typical hospitalization.

It is hard not to be grateful for the advances made in medicine in just the last decade or so, which is one reason why U.S. taxpayers invest so much through the National Institutes of Health in the basic research necessary to continue these advances. But it is difficult to look at what other developed nations – and Canada’s drug prices are hardly the lowest – are doing to hold down drug costs and not conclude that many American consumers are paying far more for these wondrous benefits that just about anyone else. The United States, not coincidentally, is one of the few nations that does not negotiate drug prices on behalf of the elderly.

Which is where the debate over a prescription drug benefit for Medicare began and where it has remained stuck despite numerous congressional hearings. The new reports on the effectiveness of prescription drugs are just more evidence that many more Americans could get better health care if they had coverage for these cures. The way the federal government can afford to do this is the way other nations have done: negotiate prices and expand coverage.