Prescription Drugs
Senator Sanders was the first member of Congress to take his constituents across the Canadian border to buy their prescription drugs at a fraction of the price they were forced to pay in the United States. Looking back at this landmark trip, Sanders said, "We took a busload of Vermonters, mostly women, many of them struggling with breast cancer, and we went from St. Albans to Montreal. I will never forget the look on the faces of those women who were struggling for their lives, when they bought breast cancer medicine at 10 percent of the cost that they were paying in the State of Vermont. The drug was tamoxifen, a widely prescribed drug for those people struggling with breast cancer. How do you have a drug manufactured by a company, manufactured in the same factory, put in the same bottles, sold in Canada for one-tenth of the price that that same medicine is sold for in the United States of America? How can that happen?"
Sanders believes that importing prescription drugs from Canada and other countries is a safe way to improve competition in the marketplace and bring prescription drug prices down. He has introduced legislation to allow for such importation. In 2007, Sanders was the only senator to vote against a Food and Drug Administration bill and he did so because the bill failed to legalize importation of lower-priced drugs. Sanders has also co-sponsored the Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act (S.1232) which would allow U.S. licensed pharmacies and drug wholesalers to import FDA-approved medications from Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan and pass along the savings to their American customers. The legislation would also allow individual consumers to purchase prescription drugs for their own personal use from safe, reliable, FDA-inspected Canadian pharmacies. Lower drug prices allow Americans to fill prescriptions that would be otherwise unfilled because costs are just too high.
Yet, efforts to implement reasonable and safe importation laws and regulations have been largely thwarted by the powerful pharmaceutical industry and its well-funding lobbying and advertising arms. The pharmaceutical industry's lobby spent more than $900 million during the past decade trying to influence Congress to keep drug prices high. During recent health care reform debates, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $1.4 million dollars a day on lobbying to influence members of Congress on health care reform.
Sanders wants to see an end to the Medicare Part D "doughnut hole". As of 2006, Medicare began helping seniors pay for prescription drugs. Yet, this program left a gap of coverage in which beneficiaries receive no assistance in paying for their needed medications. In Vermont and across the country, seniors simply cannot afford to pay 100 percent of prescription drug costs that occur when they have spent between $2,700 and $6,154 a year (in 2009). Medicare must negotiate lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry and use those savings to fill the doughnut hole. More information on Medicare drug coverage is available here.
In 2008, Sanders proposed the creation of a Medical Innovation Prize Fund that would fundamentally restructure the system of financing research and development of new medicines and dramatically reduce their prices. By rewarding only truly innovative products that provide new therapeutic benefits to consumers, this proposal would also reduce wasteful expenditures on research, development and marketing of "me-too" medicines - the majority of drugs that come to market today. Sanders' bill would directly reward developers of medicines on the basis of a drug's new therapeutic benefit to consumers - creating a true market for medical innovation that rewards advances in treatments, not clever ad campaigns for copy-cat drugs. After Food and Drug Administration approval of a new medicine, the product would immediately be subject to generic competition - creating a generics market for all pharmaceutical products right away, not after ten or more years of exorbitant prices. This proposal would also set minimum funding levels for priority health care needs such as global infectious diseases, diseases that qualified under the Orphan Drug Act, and neglected diseases primarily affecting the poor in developing countries.
Sanders is a strong supporter of prohibiting direct-to-consumer advertising by the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to 1997, it was illegal for prescription drugs to be directly marketed to consumers - as opposed to being marketed only to trained medical professionals. Sanders supports the reinstitution of that prohibition. America is one of the only countries in the industrialized world to allow this type of advertising.
