Too Complicated For Kerry To Understand?

Or is he just a liar?

One of the big faux issues of this campaign has been reimportation of drugs from Canada, supposedly saving money for the consumer. Kerry has argued that it's a simple means to cut prices for the needy.

Bush has said that it's not so simple.

Bush is right.

The most obvious reason that it wouldn't work is that drug companies would have to cooperate in their own screwing, and they're simply not going to do that.

It may make political sense to point to Canada as a solution to high prescription drug prices in the United States. But many economists and health care experts say that importing drugs from countries that control their prices would do little to solve the problem of expensive drugs in the United States, where companies are free to set their own prices. Even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that allowing Canadian drug imports would have a "negligible" impact on drug spending.

To begin with, there are not enough Canadians, or drugs in Canada, to make much of a dent in the United States. There are 16 million American patients on Lipitor, for instance - more than half the entire Canadian population.

Drug makers like Pfizer say they would reduce their shipments of drugs to distributors in Canada and other countries that re-export to the United States. "We are not going to supply drugs to diverters, in Canada or elsewhere," said Hank McKinnell, chairman and chief executive of Pfizer.

Kerry's simple-mindedness can be summed up nicely by his own spokesman: "If the impact is so negligible, why are the drug companies fighting it so much?" said Sarah Bianchi, Senator Kerry's policy director. Even if the overall bulk of imports were not that large, she added, "they would apply some pressure on the drug industry and make them revisit their pricing policies."

What we need to do is get tough with Canada and other countries that keep their prices artificially low. That forces to pay for the research by ourselves. In effect, we are subsidizing medicine in socialist countries.