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August 14, 2004

Kerry's Prescription Drug Fallacy

John Kerry criticizes President Bush for not allowing importation of prescription drugs from countries where the drugs are cheaper.
From the John Kerry for President website:

The Kerry-Edwards plan will reduce prescription drug prices by allowing the re-importation of safe prescription drugs from Canada, overhauling the Medicare drug plan, ensuring low-cost drugs, and ending artificial barriers to generic drug competition.

The Congressional Budget Office disagrees.

In a briefing entitled "Would Prescription Drug Importation Reduce U.S. Drug Spending?", their conclusion is that it might reduce prescription prices by 1%. Now, mind you, once we start reimporting drugs into our country, the FDA will not be able to regulate them - it will be hard to know what the original expiration dates, etc., would be for those drugs, but Kerry and Edwards are apparently willing to risk possibly bad and outdated pills to save 1%. And think of the possibility of terrorists reselling tainted pills to the US from - say, Canada.

Here is the conclusion of the CBO:

On the basis of its evaluation of proposals to date, CBO has concluded that permitting the importation of foreign-distributed prescription drugs would produce at most a modest reduction in prescription drug spending in the United States. H.R. 2427, for example, which would have permitted importation from a broad set of industrialized countries, was estimated to reduce total drug spending by $40 billion over 10 years, or by about 1 percent.(14) Permitting importation only from Canada would produce a negligible reduction in drug spending.

And after thinking about it some more, I suspect it will cost us more, because, for these reimported drugs to be safe, then the FDA will have to get involved with verifying their safety.

Posted by Beth at August 14, 2004 07:38 AM