I want to give people information they can share so everyone can see that Cory Booker and others are being very disingenuous.
AARP recently reported:
• In 2015, retail prices for 268 widely used brand name prescription drugs increased by 15.5 percent. In contrast, the general inflation rate was 0.1 percent over the same period.
• The average annual cost for one brand name medication used on a chronic basis was more than $5,800 in 2015, almost $1,000 higher than the average annual cost of therapy in 2014. For the average consumer who takes 4–5 brand name prescription drugs on a chronic basis, the annual cost of therapy would have been more than $26,000 during 2015—more than the median annual income for Medicare beneficiaries.
• Prescription drug price increases also affect employers, private insurers, and taxpayer-funded programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Spending increases driven by high and growing drug prices will eventually affect all Americans in some way. — Those with private health insurance will pay higher premiums and cost sharing for their health care coverage. Over time, it could also lead to higher taxes and/or cuts to public programs to accommodate increased government spending.
The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: November 2016 finds that at least 19 million Americans have purchased and imported lower cost medication, primarily from Canada but other countries as well.
“A new breed of pharmaceutical companies have become very good at targeting drugs whose prices can be manipulated without generic competition,” said Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the Aging Committee. In some cases, she said, they have used “patients as hostages.”
In its investigation, the Senate panel scrutinized price increases by Turing Pharmaceuticals, which sells Daraprim, for treatment of toxoplasmosis, a life-threatening parasitic infection; Retrophin, which sells Thiola tablets, to prevent kidney stones in patients with a rare genetic disorder; Rodelis Therapeutics, which briefly held the rights to Seromycin, a tuberculosis drug; and Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, which markets lifesaving heart drugs and medicines to treat Wilson’s disease, an inherited disorder that can cause severe liver and nerve damage.
The Senate’s Special Committee on Aging report even made recommendation that the FDA should be given the authority by Congress to allow imports of “medicines in narrowly defined circumstances, when consumers face sharp, sudden increases in the price of off-patent drugs that have no competition. The imports would be allowed only from countries with drug safety standards similar to those in the United States and would end “as soon as the monopoly was broken up,” it said. Presumably this is to continue the protection of American drug companies’ monopolies on drugs here.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times, the scare tactics and their result are discussed:
For almost 15 years big drug companies have vigorously lobbied Congress and the federal government to stop Americans from buying foreign medicines. As part of that lobbying, they have made it seem as if all medications purchased from Canada and other international sources are the same as those that come from websites that sell counterfeit drugs. Even the F.D.A. has made that suggestion. In testimony in February before a House subcommittee hearing to explore the public health threat of counterfeit drugs, Howard R. Sklamberg, a deputy commissioner at the F.D.A., said that foreign unapproved drugs posed the same health risks as counterfeit drugs.
That assertion is just not true and will scare lawmakers and consumers into believing that all imported drugs bought online are dangerous. The “unapproved” drugs are often the exact same ones sold here. Or they’re different brands, or generic versions of domestically sold drugs. Thus, many foreign unapproved drugs — specifically those ordered from licensed pharmacies — are almost always going to be safe and effective, like their United States counterparts…
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There are no reported examples of Americans dying by taking real, but F.D.A.-unapproved, medication bought online from a foreign pharmacy that requires valid prescriptions. This is after tens of millions of prescriptions have been filled online and internationally over the past 15 or so years, since online pharmacies were created.
Sadly, a few have died from buying drugs internationally that were obtained without a prescription or that were counterfeit, from rogue websites. But the most tragic domestic drug-safety-related deaths in recent years are not from personal drug importation or online pharmacies. Eighty-one Americans died from tainted heparin in 2007-8 made by an American company with bad Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients. Sixty-four Americans died from fungal meningitis contracted from United States-made tainted steroid injections sold by poorly regulated compounding pharmacies. These drugs were sold in the legal supply chain.
A much greater public health crisis than counterfeit drugs or tainted domestic and foreign medications is non-adherence to prescribed medication because of cost. CVS pharmacists reported in a survey that drug costs are the No. 1 reason that Americans do not take medications that have been prescribed. The National Consumer League estimates that nearly 125,000 Americans die each year from not taking needed drugs that were prescribed, or not taking them correctly. Fifty million Americans did not fill prescriptions in 2012 because of high drug prices, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
The best information I can find on this subject though is the International Online Pharmacy Report for 2013: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It is a long report and there are quite a few really interesting points in it. To my mind here are two of the best:
OUR DRUGS ARE ALREADY BEING IMPORTED and sold by the protected monopolies!
Most active pharmaceutical ingredients found in local U.S. pharmacy prescription drugs were manufactured overseas. According to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used in prescription drugs sold in U.S. pharmacies are imported, as are 40% of the finished pharmaceutical products.
There are no federal laws specifically banning personal drug importation, either through border crossings or by mail (ordered through online pharmacies). While drug importation is legal, federal laws regulate who can do the importing and which medications are acceptable. Under the FDCA, medications that are made in the United States and exported can only be re-imported by the manufacturer. Foreign-made drugs that are FDA-approved can be imported by wholesalers, retail pharmacies, hospitals, packagers, and, technically, individuals. “FDA-approved” is a designation that is product specific, based on registered manufacturers, manufacturing plants, packagers, pharmaceutical ingredients, formulations, labeling, composition, appearance and color. Essentially, foreign FDA-approved drugs are those manufactured, packaged and labelled for eventual sale in U.S. pharmacies. Those same drugs are packaged and labelled for different country markets as well.
Also:
If FDA’s position is based on what it can and cannot “ensure” about the safety and efficacy of a drug, it assumes or implies that the agency can ensure the safety for pharmaceuticals sold legally in the U.S. Yet GAO research shows that the FDA may have never inspected thousands of manufacturing plants that legally export pharmaceuticals to the U.S. A Government Accountability Office report from 2010, based on FDA data, found “of the 3,765 foreign establishments in FDA’s inventory for fiscal year 2009, there were 2,394 foreign establishments that may never have been inspected by FDA…This is an increase from the 2,133 foreign establishments that may never have been inspected in 2007.”
The Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012, particularly Sections 708 (Destruction of adulterated, misbranded, or counterfeit drugs offered for import) and 713 (Standards for admission of imported drugs) is a law that already allows for the importation of drugs and for the FDA to set standard of admission of those drugs and destroy drugs that do not meet the standard.