[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 18846]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           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 rise again tonight to talk about an 
issue that I suspect many of my colleagues are becoming weary of, and 
frankly, I am as well. It is the issue of the cost of prescription 
drugs and what we pay in the United States compared to what the rest of 
the industrialized world pays for those exact same drugs.
  What I have tonight is a chart. I apologize, it is a little difficult 
to read. I am going to hold up the back of today's Congressional Daily. 
It has a picture of two tablets in a little cardboard container and 
under it the captions says, ``Quick. Pick The Capsule That Hasn't Been 
Tampered With.'' And somehow we are supposed to believe that if we 
allow Americans to have access to FDA-approved drugs from FDA-approved 
facilities from around the world, that obviously people are going to 
tamper with them and people will die.
  So we have made up our own little chart, a little comparison that 
says, ``Quick. Pick The Bottle That Hasn't Been Tampered With.'' Can 
you pick which one?
  The fact of the matter is, this year we will import from other 
countries, and I have the exact number, $824,888,000 worth of imported 
wine. Now, it is altogether possible that somebody could tamper with 
that wine. Yet every day Americans buy bottles of wine from all over 
the world and they open that wine, and how do they know that it has not 
had arsenic put in it? They do not. We take a risk every day.
  Every day Americans eat imported plantains, imported cucumbers, 
imported fruits, imported vegetables, and imported meat. Americans take 
a risk every day and we do not even inspect them. Well, I take that 
back, we do inspect them a little bit. About 2 percent of the products 
coming into the country get inspected. But, nonetheless, if you eat an 
imported food that has some form of food-borne pathogen and you die, 
you are still dead.
  Now, what do we know. The CDC and the FDA keep very good records, and 
we have had testimony and we have asked them this question several 
times, how many Americans have actually become seriously ill or died 
from taking FDA-approved drugs from other countries? And it is an easy 
number to remember. It is a nice round number. The number is zero. Yet 
we continue to hear these scare tactics.
  Scare tactics serve only one purpose, and that is to obscure the 
facts. The facts, I think, speak for themselves, though, and that is 
that Americans, because we are a captive market, pay the world's 
highest prices for drugs, which largely are developed here in the 
United States and many times paid for by the taxpayers' research 
dollars. Let us take one drug, perhaps the most effective anti-breast-
cancer drug ever developed, Tamoxifen, developed essentially here in 
the United States with taxpayer dollars.
  We invested almost half a billion dollars, taxpayer dollars, 
developing Tamoxifen, but here is what really chaps my hide. Americans 
are expected to pay $360 a month for Tamoxifen. That drug can be 
purchased every day of the week in Germany for $60, as we did, or it 
can be bought in Canada for $50.
  Now, scare tactics are really not about helping Americans understand 
the facts, because the facts speak for themselves. It is about trying 
to obscure the facts.
  We require in our bill that we begin to develop a process of 
counterfeit-proof, tamper-proof packaging which will benefit whether 
the drugs are imported, exported, or made and consumed here in the 
United States.
  This is really about profit over people. It is not about safety, it 
is not about research, it is about money. It is about big money. We 
estimate that over the next 10 years, seniors alone, if we open up 
markets and markets level those prices here in the United States, 
seniors alone could save over $600 billion. That is with a ``B''. We 
are talking real money. As my colleague from Oregon earlier said, that 
could be worth more than this entire prescription drug benefit plan 
that we are talking about.
  Let me tell my colleagues the story of Dr. Wenner from Vermont. Her 
clinic began to encourage, or at least assist their patients to buy 
their drugs from Canada rather than in the United States. They have 
kept very scrupulous records. So far the records she gave us in 
testimony, which was sworn testimony before a subcommittee here in the 
House, was that her patients had been saving 62 percent, and she had 
seen no adverse reactions to the drugs.
  Later this week Members will get a chance to vote on this important 
matter, and they are going to have to ask themselves, is it really 
about safety? Is it really about research? Or is it really about 
putting profit over people?
  Ultimately, we are going to have to ask ourselves those questions and 
we are going to have to defend the answer. Because if a year from now 
we are still paying $360 for that Tamoxifen and the Germans are paying 
$60, it is not shame on them, it is shame on us.

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