Dan Burton: “for some time, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Emerson), myself and a…”

“for some time, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Emerson), myself and a number of others, Congressmen from the Democrat side, the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), our independent Congressman, have been working very hard to make sure that Americans do not pay any more for their pharmaceutical products than they do in other parts of the industrialized world. One of the things we found out when we were doing our investigation was that some of the pharmaceutical products that are sold in Canada sell for one-seventh or one-eighth or one-tenth of what they sell for in the United States. Tamoxifen, for instance, which is one of the drugs of choice for a woman who has breast cancer, costs seven times as much in the United States as it does Canada. That just is not right. Americans should not pay a disproportionate amount of the costs of research and development for a pharmaceutical product or advertising or anything else as they do in other parts of the world. Yet Americans are bearing an undue amount of the burden of producing these products. Toward that end, a number of us have been working to try to get that changed through reimportation of pharmaceutical products from Canada, from Germany, from Spain, from other industrialized nations so that Americans get the benefit of the lower prices.”