[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 117 (Tuesday, September 17, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H6297-H6298]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2100

  But the problem is that over the years the brand name drug companies 
have tried to come up with all kinds of ways of getting around the end 
of their patent, by renewing it, or playing some kind of games or 
gimmicks, if you will, to try to get the patent extended or get a new 
patent that is similar to the old one so you cannot bring generics to 
market.
  I do not want to get into all the details of this, but I want to give 
one example. Under current law, when a generic drug seeks FDA approval 
and a brand company's drug is patented, the brand company can sue the 
generic for patent infringement. But under the current law, which is 
called Hatch-Waxman, it forbids the FDA from approving the generic 
application for 30 months.
  Basically what they are saying is if the patent has expired and a 
generic wants to come in and produce the same drug, but the company 
that has the patent feels that somehow the patent is going to be 
infringed, the FDA basically gives a stay for 30 months, if you will, 
before the generic can come to market. What the brand companies have 
done is they have used this provision by dragging out lawsuits and by 
obtaining a series of 30-month delays through the last-minute filing of 
new and sometimes frivolous patents.
  I do not want to get into all the details of this, but the bottom 
line is they can keep running the period when the patent is exclusive, 
essentially, and force the situation where the generic drug does not 
come to market. There are all kinds of examples like this.
  Some of my colleagues, on a bipartisan basis, the gentleman from Ohio 
(Mr. Brown), a Democrat, and the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. 
Emerson), a Republican, introduced a bill called the Prescription Drug 
Fair Competition Act, H.R. 5272, that seeks to basically get rid of a 
lot of these loopholes so that the generics can easily come to market 
and these patent abuses cannot continue.
  This bill actually passed in the Senate, I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, by 
the other body, but so far our efforts, primarily by the Democrats, to 
bring this bill up in this House and have it passed here so it can go 
to the President and be signed into law have achieved nothing. The 
Republican leadership refuses

[[Page H6298]]

to have a hearing in committee, refuses to allow a vote to bring it out 
of committee, refuses to let it come to the floor of the House.
  Now, this is only one way of trying to reduce costs, but a very 
effective way. Essentially what we have been seeing in the House under 
the Republican leadership is that every effort that has been made, 
either by the Democrats or on a bipartisan basis as this generic bill 
was, to try to come up with formulas that would reduce costs, the 
Republican leadership just will not allow it to come up.
  As I mentioned before, in their own benefit bill, their prescription 
drug benefit bill, the privatization bill, they have this non-
interference clause that says you cannot negotiate price reduction. The 
Democrats mandate in their bill that prices are reduced. The Democrats 
in the other body, they actually passed a bill that would plug up these 
generic loopholes. The Republicans in the House refused to bring it up.
  There are many other examples. We have bills that would allow 
reimportation from Canada. As I think many of my colleagues know, if 
you compare the United States and the price of drugs in the United 
States to almost every other developed country, you take like the top 5 
or 6 countries by gross national product, Britain, France, or even 
smaller countries like Canada or Italy, whatever, Western Europe, other 
developed countries, you will find that prescription drug prices are 
significantly less, sometimes 30 or 40 percent of the cost of what you 
would pay in the United States. So one of my colleagues, the gentleman 
from Maine (Mr. Allen), proposed a bill that said that the cost that 
companies charge for prescription drugs in the United States has to be 
comparable to what citizens in these other countries pay.
  Well, of course, we cannot get that bill posted by the Republicans. 
They will not allow that to be posted.
  We have also tried to, as I said, pass a bill that would allow you to 
reimport a drug. In other words, you could apply to a drugstore in 
Canada, for example, over the Internet, or even physically go to Canada 
and bring the drugs back into the United States. Legislation has been 
introduced by my colleague, the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), 
that would allow reimportation from Canada. Republicans will not let 
that bill come up. That has not come to the floor.
  The list goes on and on. Probably one of the worst examples is that 
right now, when the brand name drug companies advertise for certain 
drugs on TV and encourage you to use a brand name as opposed to a 
generic for a particular drug, the advertising costs are actually 
underwritten by the taxpayers. They get a tax credit or deduction for 
that kind of advertising. That actually encourages you as the consumer 
to pay higher prices for the brand name drug.

  So all of these things, we have legislation on the Democratic side 
that would eliminate the tax subsidy or the deduction or the tax credit 
for that kind of advertising by the pharmaceutical companies. We cannot 
bring that up either. They will not allow it.
  The Republican leadership does not want us in any way to address the 
issue of cost and trying to reduce costs for prescription drugs, 
because basically the drug industry is behind the Republican efforts, 
paying for the Republican efforts, paying for the ads for their 
candidates, and they are basically in the pockets of the brand name 
drug industry.
  I do not mention this because I am trying to be evil or trying to say 
that all Republicans are bad or anything of that nature, but the 
problem is that the leadership very much does whatever the brand name 
drug industry wants, and that is the main reason why we are not able to 
get any kind of effort to reduce prices, and it is another reason why 
we are not able to get any kind of expansion of Medicare to include 
prescription drugs.
  Mr. Speaker, I just would like to take a little more time, and then I 
am going to conclude this evening, to talk about the benefit.
  My constituents in New Jersey over the last 2 or 3 years since the 
Medicare+Choice, the HMO programs effectively tried to sign up a lot of 
seniors under Medicare on the theory that if you signed up for an HMO 
you would get your prescription drug coverage, because Medicare does 
not normally cover it, but some of the HMOs that were offering Medicare 
policies in New Jersey were offering a prescription drug plan as part 
of their HMO Medicare policy.
  But what we found is that more and more of the HMOs after 6 months or 
a year would pull out of the Medicare program and would not give 
seniors the option, if you will, of joining an HMO and getting their 
prescription drug benefits.
  There was an article just last week in the New York Times dated 
September 10 entitled ``HMOs for 200,000 Pulling Out of Medicare'' by 
Robert Pear. It says, ``Health maintenance organizations serving 
200,000 elderly and disabled people said they will pull out of Medicare 
next year, raising to 2.4 million the number of beneficiaries that have 
been dropped by HMOs since 1998.''
  Again, if you talk about a privatization plan for prescription drugs, 
we already have the example with HMOs which were offering prescription 
drugs to seniors and increasingly have dropped them because they cannot 
afford to provide the benefit. It seems to me that that goes far to 
explain why a privatization program for seniors to provide seniors with 
a prescription drug will not work, and that is why you have to simply 
expand Medicare along the lines of what the Democrats have talked about 
in order to provide a decent benefit.
  Mr. Speaker, I will conclude with that, but I want to say that I am 
going to be here many times, many nights, over the next 3, 4, 5 weeks 
before we adjourn, and I know I am going to be joined by a lot of my 
colleagues on the Democratic side, saying that before we adjourn we 
need a Medicare prescription drug benefit that covers all seniors and 
everyone under Medicare and that is affordable, and, secondly, that we 
need to address the issue of price and rising costs for prescription 
drugs, pass the generic bill, provide some kind of reimportation, 
provide some sort of process whereby the agency that administers the 
Medicare program can negotiate cheaper drug prices. All these things 
have to be done.
  If any of my colleagues on either side of the aisle doubt that this 
is an important issue for the average American, whether they are a 
senior or not, they just should spend a couple of days at a forum or 
talking to their constituents on the street, and they will find that 
they are crying out for this Congress to address this prescription drug 
issue in an effective way.

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