PhRMA Wins Another One, Everyone Else Loses

David Sirota of the WorkingforChange blog reports about the vote on Monday in the United States Senate on a poison-pill amendment to Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA)'s S. 1082, the Prescription Drug User Fee Amendments of 2007:

The Associated Press reports "In a triumph for the pharmaceutical industry, the Senate killed a drive to allow consumers to buy prescription drugs from abroad at a significant savings from domestic prices." The legislation to allow imports of FDA-approved medicines from other industrialized nations (a practice used by other industrialized nations themselves) was sponsored by North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan (D) and has long been supported by the vast majority of the American public in opinion polls.

Yet right there on the floor of the U.S. Senate yesterday afternoon, 49 senators [including 16 Democrats] voted through a poison pill amendment, invalidating Dorgan's legislation and protecting drug industry profiteering. The sheer disregard for the truth and for consistency when it came to both the policy and politics of this vote was, in a word, stunning.

So, despite recent good news like Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva refusing to pay price-gouging amounts for anti-HIV meds from Merck and former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton and his charitable foundation's success at negotiating lower-cost meds for second-line anti-HIV treatment for patients in low- and middle-income countries to a mere US$339 per person per year, in the United States the pharmaceutical companies are running "buck wild."