Bill Nelson: “I want to discuss this bipartisan amendment, which we overwhelmingly passed last year as an amendment to the Homeland…”

“I want to discuss this bipartisan amendment, which we overwhelmingly passed last year as an amendment to the Homeland Security appropriations bill. It basically gets at one little thing that we can do to protect against the rising cost of prescription drugs. At the end of the day, what we are going to have to be able to do, on a big program such as Medicare and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, we are going to have to give that negotiating power to the Federal Government, through Medicare, to negotiate, through bulk purchases, the price of the drugs in order to bring them down. Until we can get that--and we tried earlier this year and we were not successful in getting 60 votes to cut off debate. So until we can get that, we have to go at whatever avenue we can. One way is to allow citizens to order, through Canadian pharmacies, the very same drugs they get from American pharmacies. And it is not only the same drug, it is manufactured in the same place--indeed, with the same packaging. They can order from Canadian pharmacies where they get that drug, in many cases, at half the retail price they are paying in pharmacies in the United States.”