Peter Rost in the NYT
Peter Rost has an excellent Op-Ed in the NYT:
I have a confession to make. I am a drug company executive who believes we should legalize the reimportation of prescription drugs. I know that I have a different opinion from that of my employer on this matter, but to me, importation of drugs is about much more than money; it is about saving American lives.
According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation issued in 2000, 15 percent of uninsured children went without prescription medication in the previous year because of cost, 28 percent of uninsured adults went without prescription medication because of cost, and 87 percent of uninsured people with serious health problems reported trouble obtaining needed medication. We have 67 million Americans without insurance for drugs, according to the foundation. They pay cash – full price – and can’t always afford life-saving drugs. American drug prices are about 70 percent higher than in Canada and almost twice as high as in Europe…
Every day Americans die because they can’t afford life-saving drugs. Every day Americans die because Congress wants to protect the profits of giant drug corporations, half of the top 10 of which are French, British and Swiss conglomerates.
I have another confession to make. Americans are dying without the appropriate drugs because my industry and Congress are more concerned about protecting astronomical profits for conglomerates than they are about protecting the health of Americans.
While I agree we need cheaper drugs, I don’t see reimportation as a solution. Canada’s health system won’t be able to handle it in the long term, the FDA will scream about safety, and big pharma has far more lobbyists than Peter Rost has sympathizers who will bribe every congressman they can to vote against it.
I recently wrote a magazine article about this; you can see a gonzo view of what I learned in the process on my blog (the entry titled, “Buying Drugs from Snowbacks”).
Ultimately, I feel the only possible solution is to find a way to control drug prices in this country, which will be a hard-fought batle (and nowhere near as dramatic) to ensure drug companies still can earn profits and continue to fund research. However, this will mean telling these publicly traded companies to work for some incentive other than profits to their stockholder’s so we’d have to reorganize the system from the beginning. THat’s goign to take a lot more work than most economists are up for doing.
In short, this is a complex, long-term problem and reimportation is a convoluted quick fix at best.
The next big break in the pharmaganda war may very well come from the courts. If it can be shown that the actions of Big Pharma execs expose their enterprises to the same liabilities as their cousins in Big Tobacco, then it will become advantageous for them to moderate their greed. Optimizing their profits may seem much better than maximizing them.