Senator Wellstone announces he will introduce parallel import legislation in US Senate

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

The person who sent this article wrote "And you think they give a 
damn about someone in another country?"  jamie

http://www.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisSlug=DRUG03&date=03-Jun-99&word=prescription&word=prescriptions

FDA head tells seniors agency can't help cut drug costs
June 3, 1999
Warren Wolfe / Star Tribune  (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

About 200 older Minnesotans came away disappointed Wednesday when the
head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told them there's 
little she can do to help lower the costs of prescription drugs.

"I commend your effort to tackle this complex, important issue," said
Dr. Jane Henney, a cancer specialist who became FDA commissioner last 
October. But she said the FDA has no authority to regulate drug 
prices. And she cannot endorse legislative proposals but must
defer to her boss, Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human
Services.

Members of the Minnesota Senior Federation applauded Sen. Paul
Wellstone, D-Minn., when he announced that he will introduce Senate 
legislation next week to allow U.S. pharmacies to import from Canada 
and elsewhere lower-cost drugs already approved by the FDA.

The issue is particularly important to older people, who often spend
hundreds of dollars a month on prescriptions, which are not covered 
by Medicare. Although people 65 and older make up 12 percent of the 
population, they account for about one-third of prescription drug
use.

To dramatize their discontent, federation members have taken bus trips
to Canada to buy prescriptions, which are 30 to 50 percent cheaper 
than in the United States. And for a time, members bought medications
by mail from Canadian pharmacies.

But in 1998, the FDA intercepted some of those shipments, warning that
while it is legal to visit another country and buy the drugs for 
personal use, it is not legal to get them through the mail.

"We have members who go to Canada, and we have members who are still
getting them by mail," said Faye Krohn, a federation member from 
Crosslake in northern Minnesota who moderated the meeting at the College 
of St. Catherine in St. Paul.

"If you can save $100 a month, they figure, they'll take a chance -- 
especially if it means you can afford to buy food and drugs."

For about half the 90-minute session, a federation panel grilled Henney.
She agreed "as a physician" that high drug costs are a problem for 
seniors and others who sometimes must choose between buying medications 
and buying food. She recalled the mother of an infant with leukemia who 
told her that she could afford only half the drugs her child needed -- 
"just enough to cause the side effects, but not enough [to fight the
disease]."

But the FDA's role with drugs is to ensure their safety and
effectiveness, 
she said. It is talking with other countries about making it easier to 
approve new drugs, but it is not working to ease import restrictions.

"A drug manufactured and approved abroad may have a similar formulary to
one here," but it might have different ingredients that could adversely 
affect a U.S. patient, she said.

Krohn said the Senior Federation will continue to press for lower drug
prices and for broader Medicare coverage of prescription drugs.
Wellstone 
said he would ask Shalala to respond to the questions raised by 
federation.

"This is a messed-up system, and we've been working on it for seven
years," she said. "We won't rest until we get some order here."


-- 
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org
love@cptech.org
202.387.8030; fax 202.234.5176