Ever wonder why we in the U.S. pay double or more for drugs than in Canada and many other countries?
Our government seems to be neglecting a very important part of our health care costs, prescription drugs. There are many bills in Congress concerning prescription drugs. Several address the major cost issues.
Primary pending bill initiatives are those:
• Allowing individuals to import their safe, lower priced drugs from Canada via the internet from safe suppliers.
• Having Medicare put its approved drugs out for bid, as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs does, saving hundreds of millions of dollars per year for veterans and the federal government.
• Banning drug companies from using anti-competitive tactics to prevent low-cost, high-quality generic drugs from being introduced in a timely manner.
Unfortunately for American consumers, most prescription drug bills remain stalled in committee.
On the flip side, it should be noted that Congress has increased funding of the Food and Drug Administration through higher generic drug application fees and it has expedited applications for and approved a record number of generic drugs in the last few years. But clearly, it isn’t enough.
One doesn’t have to look very far to understand why action on the three issues above isn’t moving very fast, if at all. It’s a same old story, just follow the money.
There more than 1,000 pharmaceutical company lobbyists registered in Washington, more than two for every U.S. representative and senator. To get an idea of how much money is given by the pharmaceutical industry to our U.S. lawmakers, you need to check out the research done by opensecrets.org, a website operated by the nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit the Center for Responsive Politics.
According to opensecrets.org, campaign contributions by the pharmaceutical/health product industry to U.S. politicians indicates that the five top recipients for elections from 2010 through the 2018 campaigns were: Sen. Orrin Hatch,R-Utah, $1.4 million; U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy R-California; $995,900; U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen, R-Minnesota, $932,129; U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who is also speaker of the House, $897,661; and U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. D-New Jersey, $789,207. Three of the five are in Republican leadership positions. Ohio’s own Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman got $394,796.
What is sad is that if one looks forward to the 2018 election, Hatch isn’t even running. But he leads the race for pharmaceutical money and Ryan isn’t far behind.
Hatch is the all-time leader among active U.S. senators for campaign contributions received from the pharmaceutical industry, receiving $2.85 million, according to opensecrets.org.
Ryan, who controls the House agenda, is at $1.26 million in total pharmaceutical industry campaign contributions, while McCarthy has received $1.15 million in that same category, opensecrets.org reported.
In several states, including Hatch’s own Utah, some are now trying to bypass Congress and want to buy drugs from Canada and then sell them to U.S. pharmacies at much lower costs, passing savings to consumers. This subterfuge wouldn’t be required if Congress did its job and passed related bills awaiting committee reviews.
President Trump said during his 2016 campaign said, “The drug companies are ripping us off.” Yet he continues to do very little about it. And to make matters worse, Trump last year appointed Alex Azar, the former president of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly’s American operations, as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Citizens should be contacting their congressional delegations and the president and demanding action on these matters, and not be satisfied with perfunctory responses we often get on these and other concerns from our members of Congress.
Editor’s note: The News-Herald invites opinion column submissions so all sides of an issue may be aired. Ray Sternot of Painesville is grassroots director of the Great Lakes region for the National Retiree Legislative Network.
