The Administration has made its case against drug reimportation, and it reeks of vulnerability. Drug reimportation is one issue that scares the bejeezus out of Rove, and had we put it to state referendum votes in Iowa, Ohio and Florida, we may very well have won Nov. 2. By anticipating the Administration's lackluster arguments on this issue and stripping them of their fig leaves and white lab coats, we can better exploit this potent wedge issue.
Health & Human Services has released the
findings of its task force on reimportation, several weeks overdue (
NYT and
WaPo coverage). Its conclusions are, for the most part, as expected, toeing the industry line. And a very fine line it is, indeedy.
There's more...
Bush has squirmed and flip-flopped furiously on the issue in the past, alternately conflating it with that of shadowy online drug sales and deferring to his deputies at HHS, citing vague safety concerns and forthcoming reports. At the
second debate, in St. Louis on Oct. 8, he said:
"And my worry is that, you know, it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world. And we've just got to make sure, before somebody thinks that they're buying a product, that it works. And that's why we're doing what we're doing. Now, it may very well be here in December you'll hear me say, `I think there's a safe way to do it.'"
The December rationale Bush was waiting on is a 145-page hash of reheated
PhRMA boilerplate. Its assertions are, in brief, that:
1.) Ensuring the safety of reimported drugs would be extremely costly
2.) Drugs sold online are unsafe. Ergo, reimported drugs are unsafe.
3.) Consumers really wouldn't save that much anyway
4.) Pharmas will stop making new drugs if Americans cease to pay top dollar for them
Look a little closer, and you can see why even pro-business Republican friends of pharma in congress, like Trent Lott and John Thune, are making a run for the border.
1.) Assumes that the FDA would have to inspect all foreign manufacturing facilities, just as it does U.S. manufacturing facilities, to ensure drug safety, rather than simply trusting that its counterpart in, say, Canada or the U.K. would do so adequately.
2.) This is an extremely disingenuous straw man, but it's popping up everywhere. We need to play some serious Whack-a-Mole with this puppy. Drugs sold online are not the same as drugs sold to a U.S. citizen by a Canadian pharmacy. It's that simple. The former? Well, yes, they could be from a third world (Mars, my bitches?), and yes, we should be very worried about them. The latter have been through safety and inspection processes very similar to our own, and could be shipped across borders with a simple alignment of the respective agencies and tracked through the RFID technology that pharmas are now implementing.
3.) Sure, on certain brands, consumers wouldn't save squat. So the agency is simply averaging them all out, sticking a thumb up its ass and whistling `Dixie.' On some brands, however, consumers save a helluva lot by doing their shopping up dere. Otherwise, grannies in the Northern states wouldn't be singing `O, Canada!'
4.) What can you say? From the mouths of think tanks and industry lobbyists come the darndest of things. So let's wargame the nuke-yoo-ler option, here. What happens if, tomorrow, the U.S. joins every other nation on the face of the Earth and imposes price controls on Big Pharma? Well, Wall Street isn't gonna like it, because you can kiss all those blockbuster lifestyle products goodbye, and double-digit revenue growth would be a thing of the past. So pharma stocks would suffer for a while, and the companies would have to lay off their armies of sales reps and most of the jerks in marketing. But would they all just fold their arms, purse their lips and stop making innovative products that save and improve lives? Well, no. They're still for-profit, competitive businesses. They still have to innovate to survive. They would just have to do so on much, much tighter profit margins, but with a tweaking of the patent expiration regs, they could certainly do that. However, the lifestyle and `Me-too' products that pharmas currently focus on would probably go by the wayside, so no next-generation Viagra, unless by accident.
The one problem with reimportation, however, is that it simply isn't feasible to funnel our nation's drug supply, or a good chunk of it, through Canada. The pharmas would balk and clamp down on exports, and anyway, why should we borrow someone else's price controls when we can impose our own? They're inevitable. The price of drugs is a substantial slice of our spiraling healthcare costs, which now threaten the entire economy. Big Pharma and its puppets are just dragging their feet and playing for time. But we should recognize that this isn't a real solution, but a political gimmick with which to bash the GOP. It packs a wallop, and they're sweating it. Let's use it come 2006.