by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Dec 30, 2014 | Advocacy, Drug Importation, Personal Drug Importation, Politics
The fight for access to safe and affordable medication will continue in 2015. As 2014 ends we find the price of medication continuing to escalate. AARP’s recent drug price report showed that brand name drug prices had increased by 13% in 2013, eight times the rate of inflation. The costs of generic drugs are going through the roof, some by astronomical amounts – to the tune of thousands of percent. Then of course 2014 brought us Sovaldi at $1000/pill, which is just the tip of the iceberg, as many more outrageously priced “specialty medications” are coming down the pipeline in 2015. New drugs that save lives and help people get better are great…but only if they are affordable.
In the holiday spirit, Senator Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota published a Christmas-themed op-ed last week called “How the Drug Companies Play Scrooge,” as in Ebenezer Scrooge, the greedy miser in Charles Dickens’ famous story A Christmas Carol. Klobuchar’s ghosts of Christmas past, present and future are, respectively, rampant drug price increases; the highest drug prices in the world by far; and the continuing assault on the pocketbooks of Americans by pharmaceutical companies unless Congress acts. Interestingly, Sen. Klobuchar’s metaphor compares Scrooge to Congress (not the pharmaceutical industry). She writes: “if Ebenezer Scrooge can be transformed from a crotchety, thoughtless, “bah humbug” miser to a generous steward of good will to all after only one night of ghostly visits, certainly there is hope for Congress.”
What can Congress do to end its Scrooge-like protection of big pharma? Sen. Klobuchar recommends three legislative solutions. Congress should pass legislation that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies under the same protocols permitted to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Currently, federal law actually bans such negotiations. Under one estimate, due to the VA’s ability to negotiate prices, drug prices are 40% lower when obtained through the VA than through Medicare.
Ending what Sen. Klobuchar calls “illegal pay-to-delay” deals between brand name and generic pharmaceutical companies, which postpone market availability of lower cost generic drugs, is another solution that can be addressed legislatively. Legislation introduced by Klobuchar and Sen. Charles Grassley would give the Federal Trade Commission more authority to stop those deals. Sen. Klobuchar asserts that the savings from ending pay-to-delay could be $4.7 billion for the U.S. budget and $3.5 billion for consumers.
Last but not least, Sen. Klobuchar recommends helping American consumers to personally import lower cost medication by passing The Safe and Affordable Drugs from Canada Act. This legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. John McCain from Arizona, would essentially codify the current practice of Americans buying lower cost medication from Canadian pharmacies. We support this bill but believe it needs to be expanded to include pharmacies in many other countries from which lower cost and safe medication can be and currently are obtained.
Congressional opponents of Klobuchar’s personal drug importation bill, the most vociferous among them surely raking in huge donations from big pharmaceutical companies, will argue that the Act will open the door to counterfeit drugs and rogue online pharmacies. The fact that counterfeit drugs and rogue online pharmacies exist, however, is not an argument against facilitating safe personal drug importation from verified international online pharmacies. Five million Americans already import medication for their own use. Consumers who purchase from safe international online pharmacies, such as those in the PharmacyChecker.com Verification Program, are able to save thousands of dollars a year. For many, personal importation of lower cost medication is the only option for obtaining needed prescription drugs.
While the FDA doesn’t prosecute Americans who import medications for their own use, federal law still holds that, under most circumstances, it is a crime!! It’s understandable that prescription drug importation meant for re-sale in U.S. pharmacies is regulated to that extent that those who violate the laws are subject to penalties. In contrast, people who need to import medication for their own use because they can’t afford the prices at U.S. pharmacies should not be subject to criminal enforcement of any kind, ever. So I hope that Senator Klobuchar and her colleagues, in addition to her recommendations identified above, introduce and pass a bill to amend federal law to decriminalize personal drug importation. By doing so Congress would bring prescription justice to Americans who are haunted by the scary ghosts, past, present and future, of the pharmaceutical industry.
Happy Holidays and New Year from PharmacyChecker.com!!
Tagged with: decriminalization, klobuchar, legislation
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Dec 19, 2014 | Internet Censorship
We’ve talked a lot about the efforts of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP), funded by big pharmaceutical companies, to curtail online access to safe and affordable medication by conflating rogue online pharmacies with safe international online pharmacies: most distressingly through its application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I had the opportunity to present our position about the importance of maximizing online access to safe and affordable prescription drugs by participating on a panel organized by the Internet Society New York Chapter. The focus of the panel overall was on public interest commitments as they pertain to new generic top level domains (gTLD) (i.e., new domain endings such as .book, .amazon, .religion, .nyc, and .pharmacy). Such gTLD’s area acquired through the opening up of this space by ICANN.
The mission of the Internet Society is directly applicable to the issue of online access to affordable medicine: “By connecting the world, working with others, and advocating for equal access to the Internet, the Internet Society strives to make the world a better place.”
The NY Chapter recently held a meeting in my home borough of Brooklyn! Members of the New York Chapter are currently concerned with potential abuses of the .nyc domain space. For example, the organizer of the panel and board member, Thomas Lowenhaput, is concerned that a corporation like Domino’s or Pizza Hut will own the domain pizza.nyc, not only obtaining a commercial advantage but denigrating New York pizza’s culinary cultural soul. The heart and soul of New York pizza has nothing to do with national retail pizza chains so there should be safeguards preventing commercial abuses of those premium domain names. You get the idea!
On the panel, I talked about NABP’s plan to operate the domain space called .PHARMACY because we believe it furthers pharmaceutical corporate interests at the expense of consumers, although in this case the issue is health not pizza! I informed the meeting’s participants that the NABP’s application to ICANN to operate .PHARMACY was funded by pharmaceutical companies and that its domain registration policies will help serve their commercial interests. Not surprisingly, pharmaceutical companies prefer it when consumers pay much more at U.S. pharmacies for the same medications sold in Canadian and other foreign pharmacies at a much lower cost.
NABP’s policies will prohibit a .PHARMACY registration to any non-U.S. pharmacy that sells medication to consumers in the U.S. The basis for its policy mirrors and relies on the discriminatory U.S. and state regulations prohibiting safe personal drug importation. In so doing, NABP is using the levers of Internet governance to support domestic policies that impede consumers from obtaining medications they need. Essentially, in the parlance of the Internet Society, I told the group that NABP’s vision of .PHARMACY undermines the Internet’s promise as a tool to “make the world a better place.”
Tagged with: ICANN, Internet Soceity, NABP, New York Chapter, pharmacy
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Dec 12, 2014 | Drug Prices, Healthcare Reform, Medicare Drug Plans
A Bittersweet Prescription
OPEN enrollment for Medicare Part D drug plans ended this past Sunday, but my thoughts about them linger. Our website www.MedicareDrugpPlans.com received about 150 ratings of part D plans in 2014 – most of them highly critical, and some of them downright scathing! Whether it’s a plan’s horrible customer service, lack of coverage of many brand name drugs, or dropped coverage, we’re hearing from many irate seniors. At the same time, some studies have shown most seniors are happy with their plans. Why all the contradictions about Part D? To understand, please join me on a trip down Part D memory lane.
When PharmacyChecker.com was founded in 2002, American seniors did not have pharmacy benefit plans through Medicare. While most seniors had some drug coverage through private health insurance or Medicaid, 25% were without any drug coverage and, thus, vulnerable to a pharmacy’s highest retail price. Just eight months after our website launched in April 2003, Congress passed and the president signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA), which created a pharmacy benefit opportunity for all Medicare enrollees known as Part D.
It’s amazing and sad to report that, today, the problem of high drug prices for Americans overall is worse than the problems existing before the MMA was born. In 2001, the Commonwealth Fund reported that 28 million Americans did not fill a prescription due to cost. That number shot up to 50 million Americans in 2012!
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Tagged with: MMA, Part D, seniors
