[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 72 (Wednesday, May 14, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H4095-H4096]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  THE HIGH COST OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Madam Speaker, I come to the well of the House again 
tonight to talk about an issue that is an enormous issue particularly 
for seniors and that is the high cost of prescription drugs here in the 
United States. Today I received a copy of a new book by Katharine 
Greider, and the title of the book is ``The Big Fix, How the 
Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers.'' Ms. Greider has 
done amazing research in terms of what is happening in the prescription 
industry here in the United States, and it is not a pretty picture. In 
fact, one of the most troubling statistics she came up with as she did 
her research is that 29 percent of the prescriptions written in the 
United States are not filled because people cannot afford them. And 
here we have our own FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, which 
literally is treating law-abiding citizens like common criminals simply 
because they want to go to a foreign country to buy drugs that they 
need.
  Let me give an example. We talked about this before. There is a drug 
called Tamoxifen. Tamoxifen is a miracle drug and I sort of have a 
love-hate relationship with some of the people in the pharmaceutical 
industry because Tamoxifen is a miracle drug, and it has saved lots of 
American women from breast cancer.

                              {time}  1645

  It is the most effective drug we have found. But the interesting 
thing is

[[Page H4096]]

much of the research was paid for by the American taxpayers through the 
NIH.
  What is more troubling than that is that we bought this box of 
Tamoxifen a few weeks ago at the pharmacy at the Munich airport in 
Germany, and we bought this Tamoxifen for $59.05 American. This same 
box of drugs in the same label under the same everything, the same 
dosage, here in Washington, DC, sells for $360; $59.05 in Munich, 
Germany; $360 in the United States. It is outrageous.
  Then you hear that 29 percent of Americans fail to have their 
prescriptions filled because they cannot afford the drugs. Our own FDA 
is standing between Americans and the drugs that they need.
  We hear all the time that we have to pay a lot of money for 
prescription drugs because it is for research. She begins to break down 
in her book how much actually goes to research. Of the $100 that we 
might spend for a typical prescription in the United States, use, for 
example, Lipitor, 35 percent of the cost that you pay is for marketing, 
advertising and administration; 26 percent is for what they call 
``other,'' such as manufacturing, executive pay, worker costs, labor 
and so forth; 24 percent is pure profit; and only 15 percent actually 
goes to research.
  Madam Speaker, as I have said before, I am not here to say, shame on 
the pharmaceutical industry, although more and more people are. People 
who are doing the research are saying, shame on the pharmaceutical 
industry. The truth of the matter is it is shame on us, because we have 
created an environment where we literally hold American consumers 
hostage.
  Imagine, for example, if there were two stores in town. One 
consistently had dramatically lower prices on the same products, and 
then there was another store that had dramatically higher prices. But 
yet your own government said you have to shop at the higher-priced 
store.
  In an era with bar-coding technology and all the new technology we 
can use in terms of counterfeit-proofing these packages, we can come as 
close as humanly possible in guaranteeing this is, in fact, Tamoxifen, 
and whether you get it from Geneva, Switzerland, or Munich, Germany, or 
the local drugstore, your local pharmacist ought to have the ability to 
shop around and get you the best price.
  Finally, let me explain how big a problem this is. Our own 
Congressional Budget Office tells us over the next 10 years seniors, 
just seniors, will spend $1.8 trillion on prescription drugs. 
Conservatively we are spending 35 percent more than the rest of the G-7 
countries on average. Thirty-five percent of $1.8 trillion works out to 
$630 billion.
  Then some people say we cannot afford a prescription drug benefit. Of 
course we cannot afford a prescription drug benefit if we make American 
consumers pay the highest prices in the world, not just a little 
higher.
  Do not take my word for it. There are several groups that are now 
doing the research. I do not know why the FDA does not do the research, 
because a drug you cannot afford is neither safe nor effective. 
Americans deserve world-class drugs at world-market prices.

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