Post Scripts: Why are prices at home higher?

Nearly every person in the United States has had to purchase prescription drugs at one time or another during their lifetime. What I don’t understand, despite millions of complaints, is why a person can cross the northern border of America into Canada, or travel south into Mexico, and purchase the same medications at a cheaper price than they can be purchased in the 48 states.

This matter came to mind a few days ago when I read that pharmaceutical companies are spending twice as much on advertising and promotion of their drugs as they are on research and development of new products. I recall a recent advertising blitz for a new drug, Clarinex, which seems to suggest it is somewhat of a breakthrough in the treatment of allergies. The ads claim using Clarinex will make you "feel like yourself everyday."

But according to news accounts I’ve read, Clarinex isn’t particularly new. It is a modified version of the blockbuster drug Claritin which will lose its patent protection, plus much of its $2 billion in annual sales, by year’s end. By modifying Claritin, the pharmaceutical company that introduced it will get a new patent and the monopoly that goes along with it.

The company that makes this drug is not an exception. According to the non-profit National Institute for Health Care Management, this is the rule not the exception. The majority of drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 1989 to 2000, were modified versions of existing drugs. New and highly innovative drugs comprised just 15 percent. This sort of makes one skeptical of the drug companies defense of high prices. Even worse, it raises questions about drug manufacturers’ excuses for higher and higher costs of medications that threaten to put health-insurance premiums out of reach for many.

For years the drug industry argued that higher drug prices, while a burden to most consumers, are crucial to funding research and innovation. That is quite true. Today, however, we now find drug companies turning tidy profits by making a modification in existing products and promoting them as new. This may suggest good management to some folks, but it also suggests that fattening the "bottom line" has more priority than funding innovative new products.

The AARP and Blue Cross are beginning to give more attention to the problem of higher and higher drug costs. The drug barons are fighting a discount drug plan in Maine that offers lower prices to low-income people. The AARP has joined a class-action case which alleges some drug companies illegally thwart generic competition.

Drug companies are not enemies of the people. Thanks to them we can save countless lives and extend our life span for years. Still, if they can sell drugs in Canada and Mexico for less, why are prices at home higher? People are beginning to wonder also why they should pay so much to an industry that provides different versions of what’s already in their medicine cabinet.