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Drugs imports allowed from Canada
For more than two decades,
Congress has been wrestling with the question of whether to
allow prescription drugs to be imported from countries such as
Canada,
where prices are far lower than in the
United
States.
This year, the answer may be
yes.
"I expect us to be able to
send a bill to the president," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.
"We'll see what he does with it."
Dorgan and Sen. Olympia
Snowe, R-Maine, are sponsoring a bill he said would "introduce
a little price competition into the market by allowing the
safe importation of FDA-approved medicines from
Canada and other
Western industrialized nations."
Efforts to bring a similar
bill to the floor last year were foiled by Majority Leader
Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a thoracic surgeon. Since then, Frist has
left the Senate and the leader of the now-majority Democrats,
Sen. Harry Reid of
Nevada, supports the
bill.
"Things have changed around
here," Dorgan said. "We are going to get this
done."
Pressure to change the 1987
law prohibiting the importation of drugs from
Canada and other
countries has been growing as prescription prices have
escalated here. Most brand-name prescriptions sold in
Canada and
other countries that regulate drug prices cost far less than
in the
U.S.
The ban on imported drugs
allows American drug companies to "dictate the prices
U.S. consumers
pay," Dorgan said.
His bill would achieve two
main objectives:
• Allow drugs manufactured in
the
United
States and sold to
Canada and other Western
industrialized countries to be reimported into the
U.S. as long as the
Food and Drug Administration approves the "chain of
custody."
• Allow drugs manufactured
and packaged in
Canada and other approved
countries to be imported directly to
U.S. consumers if
the manufacturing and shipping facilities are
FDA-approved.
It is unclear whether Bush
would veto the bill. The president has not commented on the
current legislation, but the White House issued a policy
statement in 2003 that said the administration "strongly"
opposed a similar bill.
That statement called the
measure "dangerous legislation" and warned it would "expose
Americans to greater potential risk of harm from unsafe or
ineffective drugs, would be extremely costly to implement, and
would overwhelm (the FDA's) already heavily burdened
regulatory system."
A Dorgan spokesman said he
questioned whether Bush would veto the current bill because
Bush said during the 2004 presidential debates that he would
support drug reimportation from
Canada if he was
convinced it was safe.
The spokesman would not
predict whether there would be enough votes in both chambers
of Congress to override a veto. A two-thirds vote would be
needed in both the House and Senate to override a
veto.
But the bill does have strong
bipartisan support.
When an FDA official
testified last week before Dorgan's interstate commerce, trade
and tourism subcommittee, some of the sharpest comments about
the FDA's position came from the panel's Republican
members.
"We're hearing ...
bureaucratic intransigence about coming up with a way in which
to allow this to happen," Snowe chided Randall Lutter, the
FDA's acting deputy commissioner for policy. "Why isn't there
the can-do spirit where it's a can't-do
spirit?"
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.,
noted the FDA already inspects and regulates the food supply
coming into the
U.S. from foreign
countries and said it was inconsistent for the agency to say
it could not inspect the prescription drug
supply.
Lutter cited a 2004
government task force report warning that allowing drugs to be
imported would open the floodgates to counterfeit drugs
manufactured or packaged without FDA inspection and
approval.
But Dorgan called the task
force's report "a joke" because the panel was filled with Bush
administration members who were on record opposing
reimportation.
William Schultz, an attorney
who served in the same role as Lutter during the Clinton
administration, said American consumers are already purchasing
drugs from Canada and other foreign sources with no way of
telling which suppliers are safe.
Billy Tauzin, a former
Louisiana congressman who is
now the chief executive officer for the Pharmaceutical
Research and Manufacturers of America trade group, warned that
European countries that allow the movement of prescription
drugs from one country to another have seen a recent surge in
counterfeit drugs, mostly from
China.
Tauzin, a Republican, argued
that the reimportation bill is not needed because the Medicare
Part D prescription drug benefit has lowered the price paid by
beneficiaries to less than they would pay for Canadian and
other foreign drugs.
But Snowe noted that many
Medicare beneficiaries are forced to pay full price for their
drugs when they hit the "doughnut hole" - the gap in which
Part D plans do not cover drug costs.
For more information on this
article refer to: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/nation/epaper/
2007/03/10/m1a_DRUGS_0310.html
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