Gilbert Gutknecht: “Well, the gentleman has done a great job of setting the stage. In this case, I should say Dr. Ganske. The gentleman…”

“Well, the gentleman has done a great job of setting the stage. In this case, I should say Dr. Ganske. The gentleman probably understands this issue as well as anybody. I sort of fell into it at some of my town hall meetings. Several years ago, seniors started to talk about bus trips to Canada to buy prescription drugs. And, to be honest, the first couple of times it came up, I just sort of dismissed it. If people want to go to Canada, they can go to Canada. But then I began to learn that the FDA actually sent these threatening letters to seniors if they attempted to reorder. Generally speaking, they will allow people to go across the border with a legal prescription and go into a pharmacy in Canada or Mexico, or, frankly, around the rest of the world. But I want to take a moment to talk about the differentials. Let us take one drug. The purple pill; Prilosec. The average price in the United States now is about $139 for a 30-day supply. And one of the aspects of many of these drugs is that once a patient begins to take these, they tend to be on them for very long periods of time. Prilosec is a wonderful drug. It is for acid reflux disease and for ulcers. It is a wonderful drug. I really do not want to bash the makers of it. But the problem is this. In the United States that 30-day supply is about $139 now. That same 30-day supply of exactly the same drug made in the same plant under the same FDA approval sells in Canada for about $55.”