The Quiet Payoff?

Big Pharma invested a lot of lobbying dollars to get the new Medicare Part D legislation tailor made to their liking. It looks like they are starting to receive a quiet little payoff for their largess courtesy of US Customs and Border Protection. Since November, the Customs department has stepped up their seizure of Canadian drugs flowing in from across our northern border. From The LA Times:

"It's huge — we've had over 800 seizures in January," up from 15 in a typical month, said Barney Britton, president of Calgary-based MinitDrugs.

Other pharmacies reported four- to five-fold increases. An informal survey of 30 Canadian pharmacies that cater to American customers, conducted by a senior-citizen advocacy website, showed that the rise began in November, doubled in December and doubled again in January.

Although federal regulators say there has been no policy change in the interdiction of prescription drugs imported from abroad, these numbers seem to tell another story. It's clear to me that something is going on, and that something is putting American's health at risk.

Of course, the republicans run the show right now, and if they ever had any concern for American's, or your pocket book, they would have used the purchasing power of the US government to set drug prices so people wouldn't have to buy Canadian drugs. They didn't, because you didn't write thousands of dollars worth of checks to them, did you.