“There likely is a substance in your house that is more precious than gold.  It cannot be used as currency, and it has a limited shelf life, but on the open market it demands a premium.  It doesn’t glitter.  It’s not in your jewelry box.  You didn’t inherit it and you cannot leave it in your will. Can’t find it? 

 

Well, before you go turning over couch cushions or tearing up the floorboards, look in your medicine cabinet.  It’s pharmaceuticals.

 

I’ve long railed against the high prices of prescription drugs and fought for ways to lower their costs.  Now that the gram-for-gram cost of acquiring many medicines prescribed by our doctors has exceeded the cost of gold, there can be no debate that we must slow the insane rate of increase in the prices of pharmaceuticals.

 

Given the relative value of those little pills in our medicine cabinets, it is no small wonder that the pharmaceutical companies will go to such great lengths to protect their hold on the U.S. market. 

 

In Washington, D.C., there are nearly 1,300 registered lobbyists who work on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.  That’s nearly three for every member of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.  Their combined fees total more than $1 billion.  This is a bill passed right along to the consumer, in the form of higher prices.

 

So what is the consumer getting for the billion-dollar premium? Very little.  The aim of the pharmaceutical lobby is to pitch name-brand pills over generics, to protect the capability of drug companies to market their products directly to consumers, and to ensure that whenever the federal government or states buy medicines for Medicare or Medicaid beneficiaries they do so at the highest possible price.  Ordinarily, I would be all in favor of letting a free market work. In this case, however, it is barriers to free trade that enable brand-name pharmaceutical companies to reap extraordinary profits. 

 

First, big drug companies are the only entity in the market allowed to import their products from overseas.  They routinely produce pills in Ireland, Mexico, China, and even Bulgaria, then import them to the U.S.  At the same time, American senior citizens were having their personal supplies of prescriptions, bought in Canada, seized at the border by U.S. Customs agents until my colleagues and I were able to stop the practice through legislation. 

 

Secondly, pharmaceutical companies are forever finding new and more creative ways to block the paths to market of low-cost generic alternatives to high-prices name brand prescriptions.  Even the Food and Drug Administration is lax about its considerable backlog of generics, and in some cases, it takes longer for the identical generic drug to get approval from the FDA than it did for the initial drug.

 

Finally, the psychology of marketing puts many pills in the hands of people who do not genuinely need them.  Who ever heard of restless legs syndrome before there was a pill to cure it and an ad on tv?  Sleep-aiding pharmaceuticals are some of the most over-prescribed in the industry, with over 27 million prescriptions written last year alone.  That’s a lot of gold.

 

With as many lobbyists as the pharmaceutical industry employs, the American public has many more.  Congress must be aggressive in the first days of the new year to break down these barriers to competition.  Only then will Americans get the medicines they require at fair prices.”