If Senator Clinton is right, about 1 million New York State residents will remain without prescription drug coverage now that the Senate has declined to pass a prescription drug benefit for Medicare. Though Mrs. Clinton arrived at her figure earlier this month by multiplying the number of Medicare recipients in the state by one-third — the proportion of Medicare recipients nationally that the AARP says lack prescription drug coverage — so it could be less. Regardless of the true number, one can be sure that there will be more than enough seniors without benefits to parade back and forth over the Canadian border in the coming months.

There was nothing unexpected about the Senate’s coming to loggerheads on the competing bills. All along this issue has played out not so much like a legislative debate as Kabuki theater before the November congressional elections. The Democratic plan at the Senate, which was optimistically estimated to cost about $600 billion over five years, was not even in the ballpark of the $200 billion President Bush was seeking for such a benefit earlier this year. This was simply an exercise to allow the Democrats to paint the Republicans as heartless over the next three months as the Donkeys prepare for what has become the almost ritualistic appeasement of gullible television reporters.

If you have been following the Senate, however, you might expect that this yearly pilgrimage will be coming to an end. After all, the Senate just last week passed a bill allowing for the reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada. But in Washington, things are almost never what they seem. The Congress passed a similar provision two years ago, with more countries included, that has never been acted upon. The catch has been that the secretary of health and human services has been required to sign off on the idea — and officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations have refused to do so. The ostensible reason has been safety concerns, both administrations claiming that counterfeit and unsafe drugs could slip through. This is but a hobgoblin to put off what both sides recognize as a bad idea. Reimportation is not going to lower drug prices at America and is apt only to play havoc with our neighbors at the North.

Canada’s prices are not magically lower than America’s — if one counts a full basket of generic and on-patent drugs, America has slightly lower prices overall. But on the blockbuster drugs where Canada does have lower prices, it achieves them through straight-out price controls, instituted by Ottawa in 1987 to keep its socialized system from going bust, as Thos. Bray pointed out on OpinionJournal.com yesterday. If reimportation is allowed, the drug companies are not simply going to sit by and watch their profits erode. Instead of allowing a large portion of their drugs sold to Americans to be marked down in Canada, they will either restrict sales in Canada, possibly even refusing to sell certain certain patented drugs there, or force the Canadians to start paying higher prices themselves. This would be a positive result as far as supporters of the pharmaceutical industry are concerned, which is probably why so many Republicans have signed onto the idea — assuming they weren’t just sick of the busloads being hauled over the border by the Democrats — as it would end the Canadians’ free ride on American pharmaceutical innovation. Now that would be a way of helping Empire Staters to get their medicines.