Tonight's news says key republicans including Trent Lott may be changing their minds and may now vote to let us buy drugs from Canada.

Two questions:

Why did they oppose this in the first place?

Can Kerry now accuse them of waffling?

Dave...I think it is the drug companies who are threatening Canadian pharmacies not to sell to Americans so they can keep prices too high here. They give lots of money to both parties.

Yep Dave, It's all the Republicans. The prices on drug have only been sky high for the last 4 years. You got 'em....

Fact is the republicans have been adamant about not letting us buy drugs from Canada. Demos have not had the votes to allow it. The Bush nominee for Medicaid/Medicare Czar refuses to even discuss his position in front of the confirmation committee. NOW, when the elephants read the polls and see how unpopular their stance is, in an ellection year, they are WAFFLING.

GP
PM

Its okay to admit when your guys are wrong, no party is perfect. I disagreed with my guys on NAFTA.

True, in and of itself, but this shows it's not given evenly across the board. Contributions

So that may explain partially why the GOP is hesitant to allow Americans to buy cheap Canadian drugs - they're simply supporting their contributors.

This is really going to torque the Canadians, though. You know damn well the cost of drugs there is going to sky-rocket. The pharmaceutical companies will get their money one way or another.

In a related story: Medicare

Oh boy ehh?? If/when their drug costs go up.... It wont be Rep/Dem to them. It will be those damn Americans...

Very true.

As I understand this the Canadian govt has capped the prices on the drugs which basically means that the American consumer is paying for all of the research and development cost for these drugs while Canada uses a kind of blackmail to keep the drug companies at bay...The blackmail goes like this: Canada has threatened the drug multinationals that they will provide the drug formulas to Canadian generic manufacturers to copy the drugs with no roylaties to the companies who devloped the drugs....Since a drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars to bring to market that could be a disaster for the drug companies.

Do a little research on companies right here is Seattle like Zymogenetics..huge amounts of cash invested without a drug making a penny on the market. There may be more to this issue than partisan blame.

The situations with the U.S drug mfgrs, as with issues of politics & the environment are 100 times more complicated than anything the evening news can dispense in it's biased, 90 second snippets.

There is a reason that over 90% of all new drugs are developed in the U.S. Unlike much of the world, our system allows for the mfgrs to reap a huge pot of gold for developing a successful new drug.

New drugs usually require 100's of millions of dollars and years of R&D before they are submitted (with their semi-truckload of paperwork) to the FDA. Then a substantial number of the drugs ARE NOT approved. The time & money is lost. Without the pot of gold incentive new R&D will come to a halt.

It's a dilemma for the politicians.

I would be all for supporting the drug mfgrs except lately they seem more interested spending $$ for TV ads for prescription drugs than R&D.