Homeowner's Blog

A pending amendment to the Senate healthcare bill would allow drug re-importation from other countries, saving consumers and the government an enormous amount of money. The pharmaceutical industry has argued that drug re-importation would gut their profits and medical research investments, but we disagree. True, they would have less money available for marketing, big bonuses, and lobbying expenses. Cutting those costs wouldn't hurt consumers or the pharmaceutical industry.

If the pharmaceutical industry also cut back on medical research as a result of the re-importation proposal, that can easily be addressed as well. We could offset any decline in corporate primary medical research resulting from the re-importation proposal by reinvesting a small part of the considerable resulting government savings in expanded government sponsored medical research. Taxpayers could recover much of those additional costs as well, simply by requiring pharmaceutical companies to start reimbursing the government for the share of publicly owned intellectual property reflected in the cost of the proprietary drugs enabled by that research. We should have done that a long time ago anyway.

Pharmaceutical companies have argued that other governments who place caps on the amount they will pay for prescription drugs are also acting foolishly, because it is undercutting their profits and medical research investments. We disagree with that as well . Those governments are only practicing the golden rule (he with the gold rules). Foreign governments can't force pharmaceutical industry to sell them their products, so it is obviously still profitable for the pharmaceutical companies to do so.