It’s clear that legislator’s enthusiasm for drug reimportation has dimmed. While Obama and many other Democrats have supported this concept in the past it is now unlikely to happen.
“You saw virtually no debate on that issue as the [presidential] campaign progressed,” said Bruce Merlin Fried, a partner in Sonnenschein Nath &Rosenthal, LLP’s National Health Care and Public Law & Policy Strategies groups.
The same reasons that led former HHS Sec. Donna Shalala in the Clinton administration not to move toward drug importation still exist today, he added. “The concern then and now [is] the difficulty in assuring the safety and efficacy of a drug that purports to be a reimportation,” Fried told the Dec. 9 AIS audioconference.
“If anything, the problems that we’ve seen in China with tainted drugs and products probably will put an end to that,” he said. “The drug companies themselves, if confronting reimportation, would use their market strategies in other countries to preclude any meaningful reimportation. I just don’t think this is going to go anywhere.”
With drug reimportation moving off the political agenda US citizens that want to access lower overseas drug prices face risks associated with buying drugs online. In the current environment, and it seems now into the future, independent Pharmacy Accreditation sites like Pharmacy Checker (www.PharmacyChecker.com) are an essential first stop for anyone proposing to shop online to get lower drug prices.