WASHINGTON — Three Republican governors and the head of a major drugstore chain on Wednesday strongly rejected the arguments of the Bush administration and pharmaceutical manufacturers against importing U.S.-made drugs from Canada and other countries.
"It is simply implausible that the United States of America ... is incapable of designing a system where we could safely import medications from Canada," Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told a Department of Health and Human Services panel studying the drug import issue.
"It's a question of setting a goal and getting it done," Pawlenty, said, calling high drug prices "a major issue for our country."
Adding to the sense of political and popular momentum behind the issue, Thomas M. Ryan, the top executive of CVS Corp., which has more than 4,100 drugstores throughout the United States, broke with other top officials in his industry, telling the task force that he also supported legalizing the importation of prescription drugs.
His statement came one day after Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson predicted that Congress eventually would pass legislation legalizing drug imports. Yet administration officials continued on Wednesday to emphasize what they considered to be significant barriers to safe and cost-effective importation and to push the Medicare discount drug card as a better, more immediate alternative.
"There's a lot that can be done while Congress sorts this out," Medicare administrator Mark B. McClellan, a member of the task force, told Pawlenty and two other Republican governors who support drug importation, Jim Douglas of Vermont and John Hoeven of North Dakota.
According to a study released Wednesday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, seniors using a Medicare-endorsed discount card will pay 10% to 17% less for brand-name drugs than the average prices paid by all Americans. Savings on generic drugs would range from 30% to 60%, the analysis found.
But the administration's enthusiastic portrayal of potential discount-card savings did nothing to quell the demand of governors and other state government officials for quick federal action to make drug importation legal.
The government must act to "make prescription drugs more affordable for the entire population," not just for seniors, Pawlenty said.
