Cory Booker!

[pnwmom]

56. It might make sense to find out why they voted no.

Patty Murray, for example, supports the general idea -- however there is no regulation in Canada right now of drugs that pass through Canada from one country to another. So what is to stop makers of fake drugs from shipping them to the US via Canada? It is already happening, and this plan would just make it worse.

The problem is that Canada's population is tiny compared to ours. So why does anyone think American drug companies would ship ten times more product to Canada then they have been, just so that the same product could be reimported to the US at much lower prices? The answer is that they wouldn't. So who would step in to fill the gap? Producers from outside Canada who aren't regulated and don't have Canadian safety standards.

What we need is to do the same thing that Canada and every other civilized country has done: have our government negotiate drug prices with the manufacturer. That makes more sense than trying to piggyback onto a system that is 1/10th the size of ours.