Are drug imports good medicine?
|
|
Idun’s Steven Mento recently testified against easing restrictions on cheaper imported medicines. That hollow rattle, the tap of a few pills inside a near-empty plastic prescription drug bottle, has become a hauntingly familiar sound for the California biotechnology industry. Hundreds of senior citizens, labor representatives and consumer activists – each with a pill bottle strung around their neck on a ribbon – are rattling their way through state legislative hearings and lawmakers’ offices to push a package of bills that aim to rein in soaring prescription drug costs. In particular, these advocates are pushing for three bills in the California Legislature that aim to help consumers and state agencies import cheaper drugs from Canada, a controversial move that the Food and Drug Administration and the drug industry vigorously oppose. The FDA argues that Canadian imports pose potential safety risks for consumers. And, with an eye on the bottom line, companies maintain that cheaper imports would cut into the profits on U.S. sales, which fund research for new drugs. Canada has taken center stage in the debate over rising prescription drug costs because, unlike the United States, it imposes price controls on drugs, resulting in discounts of 20 percent to 80 percent on brand-name medicines. Drug industry supporters say price controls come at the expense of innovation. Steven Mento, chief executive officer of San Diego-based Idun Pharmaceuticals, said the bills before the state legislature would stifle research on new drugs and discourage venture capitalists from investing in new biotech startups. “When investors look at investing, they look at risk and potential return,” said Mento, who recently testified against the bills during legislative hearings in Sacramento. “Legislation that changes that equation will have a negative impact on the ability of biotechs to find the funds to continue operations. “Fair or unfair, the U.S. prescription drug market is subsidizing the rest of the world,” Mento said. “And because of that, most of the innovation is taking place in the United States.” Though such arguments resonate among biotech executives – California is home to the largest cluster of biotech companies in the world – they appear to be winning little sympathy outside the industry. Several states, including Massachusetts, home to the nation’s second-largest group of biotechs, are considering similar legislation. And yesterday, a group of Republican and Democratic senators weighed in with a federal bill that would eventually allow drugs to be imported from Canada and other industrialized countries in Europe. The move to open the U.S. market to cheaper Canadian imports is in part a backlash to the new Medicare law enacted last year, which includes a prescription drug benefit for the 44 million seniors covered by the government health insurance program. Though the law provides protection against catastrophic drug costs, it still requires seniors to pay considerable out-of-pocket expenses for the standard drug benefit. The real beneficiaries of the Medicare law are drug makers, some drug industry critics said. One Boston University study concluded that about 60 percent of the Medicare dollars that will be spent to buy more prescriptions will remain in the hands of drug makers as added profit – or about $139 billion over eight years. “The Medicare reform bill was a blank check to the pharmaceutical and insurance industry,” said Jodi Reid, a spokeswoman for the California Alliance for Retired Americans, which supports Canadian drug importation. “People who are disappointed with what the national lawmakers have done are now taking it back to the states.” In California, several bills to cut drug prices are working their way through various committees. Most have advanced out of committees that in past years had let similar measures die. One bill that would allow the state to contract with Canadian pharmacies to buy drugs for some state agencies, including the prison system and state hospitals. Another bill would permit pharmacies to buy drugs from Canada for Medi-Cal and the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. A third bill would require the state to set up a Web site on which consumers could shop for state-approved Canadian pharmacies to fill prescriptions online. For now, any of the bills, if passed, would be technically moot, since federal law bans such imports. But some states and cities have already set up Web sites or drug-import programs in defiance of the law. So far, federal regulators have not moved against them. Consumer advocates who support state and federal initiatives to legalize drug imports dispute drug industry assertions that the practice will stifle innovation. They cite a Boston University study released earlier this month that indicates that drug companies would break even or make profits on Canadian imports because the cheaper imports would spur new prescriptions, leaving research budgets largely unharmed. “There is no reason we should be charged far more than Canadians are charged for drugs made by exactly the same companies in exactly the same way,” said Anthony Wright, a spokesman for Health Access, a coalition of consumer and senior advocacy groups. “In the U.S., the drug companies control the prices. By allowing Canadian imports we allow more competition, which is about as free-market as you can get.” Some experts also dismiss the notion that Canadian drug imports would pose a danger to consumers. They say Canada’s pharmacy and drug distribution system is comparable to that of the United States, a finding they say has been supported by U.S. government studies. “Even the FDA has no evidence of any person hurt by a Canadian drug imported to the United States,” said Alan Sager, director of the Health Reform Program at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “The real danger on the safety side of the issue is that Americans are dying because they can’t afford the medicine their doctors prescribe.” Source : signonsandiego.com |