Miracle Cure?

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The New York Sun

President Bush may face tomorrow night a question or two in respect of importing drugs from Canada. Certainly such a question was set up by the debate Friday in St. Louis. So it’s worth a quick look at why America’s drug industry is the world’s most inventive and how Senator Kerry regards the problem. On Friday, he attacked Mr. Bush and the American pharmaceutical industry, saying, “That’s the difference between us. The president sides with the power companies, the oil companies, the drug companies, and I’m fighting to let you get those drugs from Canada.”


Mr. Bush’s own answer – that he had safety concerns about drugs imported from Canada – sidestepped the issue. Before tomorrow night, the president, or his debate coaches, may want to flip through a copy of Sally Pipes’s new book, “Miracle Cure: How to Solve America’s Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn’t the Answer.”


The book is just out from the Pacific Research Institute of California and the Fraser Institute of Canada, and it includes a foreword by Milton Friedman. It reports that between 1997 and 1999, 100 new drugs were launched in America, but only 43 made it to market in Canada during that period.


How quickly can one name a Canadian pharmaceutical company? Not so easy, is it? There aren’t many famously successful ones because Canadian price controls and government regulation discourage innovation. Canada’s bureaucrats even prevent Canadian patients from gaining access to the newest American drugs. In contrast, America, which lacks government price controls on medicine, has been a center, a powerhouse for pharmaceutical research and innovation and has spawned dozens of profitable, job-creating, life-saving companies such as Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Amgen, and Genzyme.


When Mr. Kerry accuses Mr. Bush of siding with the drug companies, Mr. Bush could say, “You know what, Comrade Kerry, you are right. I’m for free enterprise. I do support America’s drug companies. Their scientists are making amazing breakthroughs every day that are helping to cure or treat a lot of sick patients. Those companies are employing a lot of hardworking Americans. And the way we create that environment for innovation in America is with competition and the free market, not by letting some Canadian commissar dictate the prices.”


Mr. Bush might remind Mr. Kerry of something the Democrat said during one of the debates back during the primaries. “Democrats can’t love jobs but hate the people who create them,” Mr. Kerry said on September 25, 2003. In the case of the drug companies, Mr. Kerry is failing to follow his own prescription.


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