[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 103 (Monday, July 14, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H6684-H6685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    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. Mr. Speaker, I rise again tonight to talk about the 
high cost of prescription drugs, and I am going to be showing a chart 
and talking about what I think are some pretty stubborn facts. But 
before I do, I just want to remind the Members of something that 
Abraham Lincoln said over 100 years ago: You can fool some of the 
people some of the time, you can even fool all of the people some of 
the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
  Earlier, my colleague, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton), rose 
and showed some righteous indignation about some of the kinds of 
advertising that are going on right now, and they are now saying that 
somehow if we are in favor of opening up markets to give Americans 
access to world-class drugs at world-market prices that somehow we are 
in favor of abortion, which is just a ludicrous argument to make. It 
says a lot about those groups, and I think my colleague, the gentleman 
from Indiana (Mr. Burton), raised some of the questions about the 
ethics of those groups who are sending out those brochures and running 
those ads.
  I think it is fair to ask where the money really comes from, and I 
think we all know where the money really comes from, but at the end of 
the day I think we ought to ask ourselves about the ethics of the 
pharmaceutical companies, the companies who are actually paying for 
those ads, the companies who actually develop and sell RU-486.
  Why is it that they want to change the subject? Why is it they do not 
want to talk about the real issue? They want to talk about anything 
they can except this chart.
  The reason is simple. They cannot defend this chart. They cannot even 
explain this chart. I have asked them to explain this chart. Let me go 
through some of the numbers on this chart.
  These are not somebody else's numbers. This is not some goofball 
group from Florida. This is not some left wing or right wing extremist. 
These

[[Page H6685]]

are my numbers. Because I went to Germany 2 months ago, and we bought 
10 of the most commonly prescribed drugs. The total price in the United 
States for those same drugs, $1,389.65. We paid $373.30 in Munich, 
Germany. I cannot explain that. They cannot explain that.
  We know that, for example, every day Americans consume thousands of 
tons of imported foods. Last year, we imported 318,000 tons of 
plantains. We imported $1.1 billion worth of bananas last year.

                              {time}  2030

  Americans gladly consume those bananas. About 40 percent of the 
orange juice that we consume in the United States now comes from other 
countries. We are an importer. Markets work. The reason we import is 
because we can buy those products cheaper in those markets than we can 
produce them here in the United States. But in many cases we are not 
talking about products that are produced somewhere else. Many of these 
products are produced here. But we are talking about products produced 
in FDA-approved facilities, drugs like Coumadin, which my father takes.
  We bought Coumadin in Munich, Germany for $21. This same Coumadin 
package in Washington, D.C. sells for $89.95. Let us talk about ethics. 
Two years ago this package of drugs in the United States sold for $64. 
Nothing has changed. This drug was developed in the 1940s at the 
University of Wisconsin Veterinarian School. How did it go from $64 2 
years ago to $89 today? Is that ethical? Is that responsible? Yet they 
sell it in Germany for $21.
  My colleague talked about Tamoxifen. The American taxpayers paid to 
develop Tamoxifen. We paid hundreds of millions of your taxpayer 
dollars to develop Tamoxifen. They sell it in Germany for $60. A woman 
suffering from breast cancer here in the United States will pay $360 
for this drug. Is that ethical? Is that responsible? Is that the kind 
of companies we are dealing with? Go down the list.
  We had another example in several of the publications. The drug 
Taxol, we paid for the development. We took it through phase 2 trials 
at the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. We paid for all of that, 
hundreds of millions of dollars; and then the company came along and 
signed a licensing agreement, and we have gotten royalties back of $35 
million, but the company has had sales of $9 billion. We got $35 
million for the taxpayers after spending almost $500 million for 
developing the drug, and they got $9 billion in sales.
  Let us talk about ethics and being responsible. We had a big debate 
last year about Enron and the stock holding companies and insider 
trading. We said this ethics thing has to change. This is one way we 
change it. We open up markets and hold people accountable, and things 
will change.

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