Prescription Crusade Gains

When a Bush administration Cabinet member said last week that “Congress is going to pass” legislation permitting consumers to buy lower-priced prescription drugs from abroad, it sounded like a policy turnaround. Actually, the White House still strongly opposes the legislation, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson wasn’t embracing the idea, just recognizing the inevitable.

Thompson’s job, however, puts him close to the clamor for relief from prescription drug prices, which are 35% to 55% lower in Canada and other industrialized countries besides the U.S. In recent weeks, the crusade to legalize drug imports has grown to include the Republican governors of Minnesota, Vermont and North Dakota, attorneys general from California and 17 other states and drug-industry renegades like Tom Ryan, the CEO of CVS, the second-largest U.S. pharmacy chain.

Support is also building in Congress. Last year, a bill to legalize drug imports passed the House 243 to 186, though without Senate action it died. In a second milestone, the Senate’s health committee on Thursday plans to consider a drug import bill by Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) that addresses the Bush administration’s key public objection to re-importation: that it would endanger public health.

Snowe’s S 2328 would let states set up systems to help people buy medications manufactured in FDA-approved facilities and shipped back to the United States in their original packages. (Such a rule shows the Alice-in-Wonderland illogic of drug pricing, when U.S.-made drugs can be bought in Canada and shipped back for less than they cost at the local pharmacy.)

Ryan explained in testimony before a White House task force recently that prescription drugs could be imported safely in several ways -- including by selling them through well-known pharmacies like, you guessed it, CVS.

Also this month, the chairman of the task force, former Food and Drug Administration head Mark McClellan, warned that his study could take until after the November election. He recommended that states try to save money by helping residents “capitalize on new Medicare-approved drug discount cards,” issued by the pharmaceutical companies that so strongly oppose imports. The cards, however, are proving to be a bust in part because the law allows drug companies to raise prices more or less at will, while consumers must wait until the end of the year to change cards.

Snowe’s bill, by contrast, could offer relief now if the health committee chairman, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), lets his members vote on it, and if Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who recently said, “I don’t know if we will get that [issue] done this year,” stops delaying and allows a vote on the Senate floor.