[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10581-10582]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              BRINGING DOWN THE COST OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Schrock). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I will start off by yielding to the 
gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht).
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, I want to come back to something that the 
gentleman from Georgia just said, and I think it is an important 
comment. What we are talking about now is the prescription drug benefit 
under Medicare that will benefit seniors, and it will benefit seniors. 
We are going to put $350 billion into a program and that clearly will 
benefit seniors. But it will do nothing for those families right now 
who are struggling to pay for expensive drugs because they have a sick 
child. That is where, if we allowed reimportation, we could 
dramatically bring down the price of drugs, not just for seniors, but 
for everybody.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, here is a letter from a woman in Colorado 
who says that she actually is now getting her Tamoxifen from Canada. It 
took a little longer to get the prescription filled, but it is $160 
savings every 2 months, $80 a month savings. That is a lot of money for 
somebody on a fixed income.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, that is almost $1,000 a year.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Absolutely. There are some other things that we have 
talked about that we think Congress should do to continue to decrease 
the

[[Page 10582]]

price of drugs. We mentioned reimportation; we mentioned the 
prescription drug benefit on Medicare. But there are also issues such 
as malpractice reform, patent reform, decreasing the time for drug 
approval that it takes the FDA to sign off on a new drug, and also to 
look into the overprescription. The gentleman may know that the 
University of Minnesota has actually done studies on this where they 
have found as high as 40 percent of the drugs taken by seniors no 
longer need to be taken, or the prescription is actually wrong, and 
that is costing millions and millions of dollars each year.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I think we 
have to attack this problem on many fronts. The more we learn about it, 
the more we realize there are an awful lot of problems.
  One of them is all of the money that the pharmaceutical companies are 
spending on marketing. I happen to believe in free speech, so they 
ought to be able to advertise; but we ought to at least know how much 
of that drug dollar is going to advertising. They ought to have to 
disclose that to people like us so that seniors know how much they are 
spending on marketing.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, there are some companies who are actually 
leading the way. Eli Lilly, to their credit, has stopped this practice 
of going to a doctor's office and buying the whole staff lunch for the 
day, and then leaving them with trays and trays of free prescriptions 
for samples. I think Eli Lilly should be commended for leading the way 
into a different way of marketing, and I think other drug companies 
should take a look at that.
  I want to talk just real briefly on patents. Prozac went off patent 
last August, and the price of Prozac fell 70 percent. The question is, 
when we pay for so much of the research and development on a new drug 
as American taxpayers, should drug companies still be given a 17-year 
patent? I think that should be something that we should discuss. Maybe 
it should be longer. Maybe it should only be 5 years, though.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, I think if we are paying for most of the 
research, and something else most Americans do not know, and that is 44 
percent of all of the money spent on basic research in the world is 
spent by Americans and American companies.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, it is something we should look at.
  Finally, this approval process, sometimes it takes as long as 8 years 
to get FDA to approve a new drug. We should reduce that, particularly 
for drugs that are often being used in European countries that are 
already on the market, there is a track record for them, and the FDA is 
still holding them up. We have to ask ourselves how many people are 
dying or suffering or are in pain during this approval process that had 
they been living in another country, then they could get access to 
their medicine.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, coming back to the cost of research, I 
think we in the United States ought to be willing to pay our fair share 
for research. When we look at these charts, clearly we should not be 
required to subsidize the starving Swiss.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Again, Mr. Speaker, these drugs are things that seniors 
are paying too much for right now. We have a woman in our office who 
has a relative in El Paso. To get a prescription filled in El Paso it 
is $90. To go over the border to Juarez is $29 for Lipitor. It is such 
a tremendous savings. But we see some of these drug companies, their 
ads are slick, they are expensive, they are enticing. I have no problem 
with them spending that money that way; but I do have a problem with 
saying we can import our tomatoes, we can import all of our other 
groceries from Mexico or Canada or any other country; but when it comes 
to drugs, even FDA-approved drugs, we have special roadblocks for that, 
and it hurts American consumers. We have the North American Free Trade 
Agreement; and by golly, we ought to be able to leave Detroit and go 
over to Windsor, Ontario, and buy drugs.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, in the era of the Internet, NAFTA and 
world trade, the FDA should not be allowed to stand between American 
consumers and lower drug prices.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's hard work on 
this, and I look forward to working with him on this legislation.

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