WASHINGTON   –  “I never assume that I’ll just be talking about agriculture simply because I am on my annual Farm Tour.  I visit a lot of places – I went to 15 counties in four days this year – and I fielded at least one question about health care at most all of the stops.  Interest in this important issue is intense, which is good, even on a series of stops focused on our farms, ranches, dairies, and value-added businesses.

The bottom line is this – health care is an important part of every businesses, every family, and every community in our congressional district – even on the horse farms.

At one event, a gentleman told me about his personal experience: his wife has recently been diagnosed with cancer.  The prescription drugs her doctor wants her to take cost $16.75 per pill, and she is supposed to take one pill per day.  That’s more than I spend on groceries to put a weeknight family meal on the table.

Obviously, that kind of expense is serious – and the math makes it easy to see why. $16.75 a day means $117.25 per week, $502.50 per month, and $6,113.75 per year.  For this family, it understandably paid to shop around.  So they called a reputable pharmacy in Canada, which said it could fill the same prescription by mail for less than 40 percent of the U.S. price, $6.60 per pill.

It’s the same pill, the same packaging, the same controls and the same prescription.  But this example is indicative of a glaring problem in U.S. health care: Americans are the world’s best customers of prescription medicines yet we pay the world’s highest prices.  We pay those prices as patients, as taxpayers, and as participants in the health care system where greed is never good.

Lots of Americans are in exactly the same situation as the family I just described.  They come from all walks of life; they are all ages; they are in a variety of states of health; and they all pay extraordinary prices for prescription drugs when there is no competition either from a generic version of the pill or a safe, lower-priced alternative on the world market.  If we do not address basic cost issues like this one, any attempt at health care reform will be lacking in a fundamentally-flawed fashion.

There are good solutions on the table, but there is also powerful opposition from the name-brand drug industry.  Efforts to open foreign markets which have regulatory structures similar to our own encounter iron-fisted opposition and colossal campaigns of misinformation from the drug companies.  Legislation to speed generic drugs to market and to make possible generic versions of new kinds of drugs has been shackled in Congress by the best efforts of the army of lobbyists sent to bury the bill.  And last week we learned that the White House made a deal that, for $80 billion in concessions over ten years from drug manufacturers, there would be no further legislation to get cost savings from the industry.

This is a sweetheart deal for an industry which hosts ten companies in the Fortune 500 that rack up tens of billions in profits every year.  Furthermore, these ten companies routinely earn as much in profits as the other 490 Fortune 500 companies combined.  For reform to touch every one of us, but leave these critical issues unaddressed, would be a massive failing of policymakers to Americans who want and need lower costs in order to maintain their good health.”