Cheap Prescription Drugs Denied Access

"The Senate Guts Drug Bill." Trouthout

As usual, might won over right. Last time I posted here about proposed amendments to the PDUFA. Well, true to form, the United States Senate voted to not allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. The stated basis of this voting was that the Food and Drug Administration cannot certify the imports would be safe and effective.

This vote is justified to the extent that the FDA does not have and cannot afford the resources to create the bureaucracy that would be required by a certification procedure. However, this defense is a strawman specifically erected so that it could be knocked down. If imports were accepted, there would be no need to certify them as safe since those drugs would have already been approved by the FDA. One sponsor of the bill went as far as to assert: "arguments that imports would open the door to dangerous counterfeits are nonsense perpetrated by big drug companies protecting their profits."

I agree. There is also the millions in user fees the FDA collects for reviewing applications from pharmaceutical companies. Permitting the re-importation of cheap, American prescription drugs is not the purpose of the current review of the Prescription Drug User fee Act, scheduled to expire in September. Rather, the sole purpose is to provide for continuation and substantially increase of the user fees paid to the FDA. Thus we see that the cheap drug re-import debate was merely a smokescreen engineered to distract from the real reasons for review of the statute.