Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009
Floor Speech
Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I thank the chairman for yielding. Before I get into the subject I wish to talk about, which is prescription drug reimportation and the absolute necessity of lowering the cost of prescription drugs in this country, I wish to say a word in general.
I find it interesting that my Republican friends are spending a whole lot of time down here on the floor attacking the health care legislation. I suppose it is at least a positive thing that they are beginning to talk about health care. They ran the government from 2000 to 2006. They had the President, they had the House and the Senate. At that time, health care premiums soared. Millions of Americans lost their health insurance. Where were they?
Where were they in the beginning to come up with ideas to control health care costs and provide health care to more Americans? They weren't there.
Now, having said that, let me also say I have problems with the bill that is currently on the Senate floor. Clearly, it does a lot of things that are good, but there are weaknesses in this bill in terms of cost containment that we have to address.
When some of my friends talk about expanding Medicaid and the problems associated with that, they make a good point. We need to significantly expand our primary health care capabilities, which means more community health centers, which means more primary health care physicians. If we are not able to do that while we add 15 million more people to Medicaid, frankly, I am not sure how we are going to deal with the medical needs of those people.
So I think one of the imperatives that has to happen as we proceed on this bill is we have to support the language in the House, which substantially increases funding for community health centers and for the National Health Service Corps, so that we give a primary health care infrastructure--clinics and doctors--to begin to serve the millions more Americans who are going to be coming into the health care system.
That is one issue. The other issue I wanted to focus on today--and I am here because Senator Dorgan, who is the sponsor of this legislation, is unable to be on the floor of the Senate at this time--deals with prescription drug reimportation. This is an issue I have worked on for many years. When I was Vermont's Representative in the U.S. House, I believe I was the first Member of Congress to take American citizens over the Canadian border--in this case to Montreal--in order to purchase affordable prescription drugs.
I will never forget--never forget--the bus trip we took over from St. Albans, VT, to Montreal, Canada. On that bus there were a number of lower income women who were struggling with breast cancer. Many of them were using the widely used breast cancer drug called Tamoxifen. We got off the bus in Montreal, and we walked into the drugstore--and that had all been prearranged--and in there they purchased Tamoxifen. At that point in time--and I am thinking it was about 10 years ago, a while back--they paid, in American dollars, one-tenth of the price for Tamoxifen in Montreal, Canada, that they were paying in the United States of America--one-tenth of the price for lower income women who were struggling for their lives.
So when you talk about morality, I want some of my friends to explain why it is that the American people are forced to pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs? Talk to physicians in Vermont. There is a doctor I know in northern Vermont, and when she writes a prescription, one-third of her patients cannot afford to fill the prescription. So what is the sense of an examination, a diagnosis, and writing a script when your patient can't even fill that script?
The high cost of prescription drugs in this country is one of the major health care crises we face. It is an issue we have to deal with, and we simply have to ask ourselves why it is that the same exact medicine in this country costs substantially more than it does in Canada, in Australia, or all over Europe.
There has been a lot of concern in this country about the lack of bipartisanship. Well, I have to say that on this issue there is bipartisanship. That was true when I was in the House, and that is true in the Senate.
Let me just read to you the cosponsors of this legislation--Democrats, Republicans, Independents. The bill is introduced by Senator Dorgan, and the cosponsors are Senator Begich, Senator Boxer, Senator Casey, Senator Conrad, Senator Feingold, Senator Inouye, Senator Klobuchar, Senator Leahy, Senator Lincoln, Senator McCaskill, Senator Sanders, Senator Snowe, Senator Stabenow, Senator Thune, Senator Bingaman, Senator Brown, Senator Collins, Senator Durbin, Senator Grassley, Senator Johnson, Senator Kerry, Senator Kohl, Senator Levin, Senator McCain, Senator Nelson, Senator Shaheen, Senator Specter, Senator Tester.
So there is widespread bipartisan support for legislation which says: Let's end the absurdity of the American people having to pay substantially more for the same exact medicine that is sold in other countries around the world.
Let's take a look at some of these charts. To begin with, we all understand when you deal with the drug companies and the pharmaceutical industry you are dealing with some of the most powerful lobbyists and forces right here in Washington, DC. These people spend huge amounts of money on campaign contributions, huge amounts of money in lobbying. Just recently, in order to make sure they got in under the wire, in case there was some real reform passed in Washington, they substantially raised their prices for particular drugs just in the year 2009, and here is the chart reflecting that: Enbrel, a 12-percent increase; Singulair, 12 percent; Plavix, 8 percent, Nexium, 7 percent; Lipitor, 5 percent; Boniva, 18 percent.
One of the reasons health care costs are soaring in America--and one of the reasons many seniors are having such a difficult time with health care costs--is precisely the rapid rise of prescription drugs.
What I want to talk about now, through this chart, is something that is inexplicable to the average American. This is Lipitor, which is a widely used drug, and here is the cost of Lipitor. The same amount in Canada costs $33; in France, $53; Germany, $48; the Netherlands, $63; in Spain, $32; the United Kingdom, $40; and in the USA, $125, or four times as much as it costs in Canada.
Now, you explain that to me. The same exact medicine made in the same exact factory, the same exact bottle. That is why, by the way, in the State of Vermont, and all across the northern tier, every day people are going over the Canadian border or using the Internet to buy those drugs. So what we are saying in this legislation is let's end this absurdity.
We are living in a global economy. I have a lot of problems with the global economy in many ways, but if, when we go Christmas shopping, the only products we can find are made in China--because we don't do too much manufacturing in America--and if when we eat lunch we get lettuce and tomatoes from all over the world, what people are asking is, why is it we can't bring into this country FDA-safety-approved medicine? We can bring lettuce in from the backwoods of Mexico, and that is OK. But somehow, when we have a handful of major pharmaceutical companies, presumably it is just too difficult to be able to bring them safely into the United States. Nobody believes that for one moment.
Let's take a look at another chart. Plavix, same story: Canada, $85; France, $77; Germany, $85; the Netherlands, $77; Spain, $58; the U.K. $59; and in the USA, $133. Somebody explain this to me. I really would appreciate it.
Nexium: Canada, $65; Germany, $37; Spain, $36; the UK, $41; and the United States of America, $424. That is six times more than in the United Kingdom. People wonder why Americans are running over the Canadian border or they are on the Internet trying to get this medicine.
Why is it that the drug companies charge $424 here and $41 in the UK? Well, the reason they are charging more here is because they can charge more. If you walk into your drugstore tomorrow, you can find the prices that you will pay are double, triple because we are the only country in the world that does not have, in one way or another, some kind of regulation on prices. All these other countries have national health care programs. That is another reason their drug prices are lower. We don't, of course.
But at the very least, what reimportation is all about is, we are saying, in a global economy, when all kinds of products are brought in from all over the world and we let the consumer buy them every day, why not let the pharmacist, let the prescription drug distributor be able to take advantage of the global economy?
I am not, I must confess, a great supporter of unfettered free trade. I think that has, in many ways, been a disaster for American workers. But to the degree that it is here, to the degree businesspeople can run to China and pay workers there 50 cents an hour or so, that is the global economy. Well, here is the global economy: Canada, $65; the UK, $41; and the USA, $424. Why can't prescription drug distributors purchase their products in the UK, bring them back into America, so we can substantially lower the cost of health care and prescription drugs for all Americans?
Some of my friends in the pharmaceutical industry say: It is impossible to bring medicine in from abroad. It can't be done safely. Well, the Washington Post says:
40 percent of active ingredients in U.S. prescription drugs currently come from India and China.
I guess that is OK for the pharmaceutical industry, when it adds to their profits, but we can't do that to lower the cost to the consumer.
The Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2008, says:
More than half the world's Heparin, the main ingredient in the widely used anti-clotting medicine, gets its start in China's poorly regulated supply chain.
Well, I guess that is OK too.
So here is where we are. One of the many health care crises we face in this country is the high cost of prescription drugs. I think there is a lot that we have to do. Whether the Congress is capable of standing up to the drug companies and all their money and all of their lobbyists remains to be seen. But this is, quite frankly, a no-brainer.
For all my colleagues here who believe in unfettered free trade, please do not be total hypocrites. If you believe in unfettered free trade--which I happen not to--if you believe it is OK for American companies to shut down and run to China, if you think it is OK for people to buy any product anywhere in the world, tell me why we can do that for everything except for prescription drugs? There is no rational explanation.
This is legislation which has been around for years. The drug companies have fought it successfully for years. We now have widespread tripartisan support in the Senate and a lot of support, I know, in the House. Let's finally stand up for the average American. Let's substantially lower the cost of prescription drugs. Let's pass prescription drug reimportation.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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