Letters to the editor

A rebuttal on ’half-truths’

In responding to my Op-Ed, Rep. Anne M. Northup, Kentucky Republican, asserts that she is a staunch defender of pharmaceutical patents who is merely promoting free trade of prescription drugs so that Americans can save millions of dollars on their drug bills (“Importation and prescription prices,” Wednesday).

En route, she runs through the usual half-truths about importation. First, she claims that drug prices are “artificially” high in America, when in fact, price controls in developed countries make them artificially low. Second, she claims that drug prices in Canada — the very Canada that is shutting down bulk shipments of the price-controlled drugs Mrs. Northup hungers for — are 50 percent to 80 percent lower than brand-name drugs in the United States. She uses the old trick of excluding generic drugs — we use more, and they are generally half the price they are anywhere else in the world — and ignoring exchange rates, as well as Medicare and managed-care discounts, to reach that number.

Mrs. Northup goes on to assert that drug companies “argued that allowing individuals, wholesalers and pharmacies to import FDA-approved drugs — which would lower prices — would eliminate the funding for research and development of new drugs. Yet significant R&D work goes on outside the United States in countries without captive consumer bases.” Now that’s a switch. Europe, Canada and Australia have single-payer systems where the government sets the prices and determine who gets what medicines (England just decided not to pay for Alzheimer’s drugs), but America has a captive consumer base. But I digress.

No one claims R&D would be eliminated. Rather, it would just fade away, as it has in Europe. Indeed, thanks to America’s free-market pricing, U.S. biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms invest more relative to Europe. In 2003, American biotech and pharmaceutical firms increased their R&D investment by 16 percent, compared with a 2 percent decline in Europe. Today, European pharmaceutical companies spend less than half of their R&D in Europe, down from 73 percent in 1990. While Europe has more biotech companies than America, we have 75 percent of all biotech revenue worldwide, 75 percent of all R&D expenditures and 80 percent of all key biotech patents.

There are 400 drugs in development for cancer. More than 90 percent of them are the product of American pharmaceutical and biotech investment. Mrs. Northup does not have to take my word for it. She can ask Dr. Daniel Vasella, chief executive of Novartis, the Swiss company that moved its research operation to America, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, respectively: “Any government under pressure could do things that are shortsighted. We have seen the effect in Europe — less investment in R&D and less progress in treating diseases like cancer. Many Europe-based companies are focusing increasingly on the U.S. market.” “As a result of price controls, European consumers are heading toward second-class citizenship when it comes to access to medicine.”

Still, Mrs. Northup insists that importing price-controlled drugs into America is worth it. The question, then: Is what she is suggesting tantamount to breaking patents to reduce drug prices, which is what Brazil is doing? Mrs. Northup supports the following: allowing drugs made in Europe and Canada but that have not gone through the Food and Drug Administration approval process to be imported anyway. If companies object to having their patents shredded by virtue of having these equivalents (they are called “similares” in Rio) brought in against their will after a cursory review of an application by the FDA, they can be sued under antitrust laws. Thus, Mrs. Northup vitiates the original patent and the integrity of the drug-approval process for a few dollars more.

But that’s not all. Under the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act of 2005, companies would be prohibited from setting their own prices here or at home and from deciding whom they want to sell to and at what terms and in what amounts.Inessence,Mrs. Northup supports handing the power to set prices and volumes to foreign governments and foreign wholesalers.

And that’s before she decided to sponsor a bill that would prohibit the U.S. trade representative from negotiating trade agreements that would stop the importation of all products that have artificially lower prices due to government price controls or subsidies. Mrs. Northup is nothing like Brazil; because she couches her patent shredding in populist rhetoric, she is far worse.

Mrs. Northup has called me a frontman for pharmaceutical and biotech firms. I am glad to stand up for the property rights of researchers and scientists who have developed medicines that have saved many lives, including my daughters’. Better that than being the mouthpiece for the importation of the failed socialist experiment of price controls.

ROBERT GOLDBERG

Director

Manhattan Institute’s

Center for Medical Progress

New York

States’ ideological rights

Tony Blankley takes Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. to task (“Sen. Biden’s words,” Op-Ed, Wednesday) for misusing the word “ideology.” Mr. Blankley quotes Humpty Dumpty’s remark to Alice that a word “means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Mr. Blankley sees that same frivolous misuse on Mr. Biden’s part.

He proceeds to explain that when referring to judges with whom he differs, Mr. Biden should acknowledge that they merely have an established judicial philosophy, not an ideology.

Sounds good, but what happened to that “judicial philosophy” in December 2000, when every single one of the judges whose votes gave the presidency to George W. Bush moved away from what they firmly believed: states’ rights over the interference of the federal government?

At that point, their judicial philosophy gave way to their political ideology. Even Humpty Dumpty would agree.

JOAN SALEMI

West Springfield

Foreign laws in a democracy

Chuck Woolery (“Understanding the rule of law,” Letters, Wednesday) apparently fails to understand the basic precept of a democracy.

It isn’t that democracies are closed to ideas generated outside the country. Democracies probably are the best-suited of all the forms of government to accept new ideas and adopt laws first developed overseas.

The issue Thomas Sowell discussed in his Saturday Op-Ed column, “Foreign law fantasies,” wasn’t that democracies never adopt foreign ideas. One of the key features of a democracy is that it can adopt ideas from anywhere.

The issue is that in a democracy, the electorate chooses laws by electing representatives to enact those laws and expects the courts to interpret the implementation of those laws. Democracies do not adopt foreign laws or other ideas of government by having them applied by an unelected judge without the prior acceptance by the elected representatives of the governed.

It’s the concept of self-government — we choose the laws by choosing the lawmakers — that is at the heart of the issue.

STEVE GRIMAUD

Crofton, Md.

Obesity and milk

Kim Seidl of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is correct when she states that a recently published Harvard Medical School study found that low-fat milk caused weight gain in children (“Milking fad diets,” Letters, Wednesday). However, she neglects to add that the researchers also found that drinking full-fat milk was not associated with weight gain.

Farmers know that if you feed whole milk to pigs, they remain lean and do not gain weight. But if you feed skim milk to pigs, they gain weight easily. Now we have a study showing that this paradox also applies to humans.

Butterfat in milk, especially milk from cows outside eating green grass, provides many unique nutrients that support thyroid function and help the body build muscle rather than fat. The rise in obesity in our young people has exactly paralleledthetrendtoward consumption of reduced-fat milk. It’s as though the body, denied the healthy, natural fat it expects to receive from the diet, compensates by producing extra fat from carbohydrates.

SALLY FALLON

President

Weston A. Price Foundation

Washington