Gilbert Gutknecht: “We begin to open the door. What happens right now, to try and explain what happens, for example, and let me take another…”

“We begin to open the door. What happens right now, to try and explain what happens, for example, and let me take another drug on that list, Cumadin, that is a drug that my 82-year-old father takes. The average price in the United States is over $30. The price in Europe for the same drug is $2.85. What happens sometimes is people are traveling, and they happen to have their prescription along with them; they are traveling perhaps in Italy and they realize they are running short on their Cumadin. It is a blood thinner. It is very commonly prescribed. They go into a pharmacy and they buy it; and when they convert the lira to dollars, they realize that it was less than $3.00. That is 10 percent of what they pay back in the United States. So when it is time to renew that prescription, some people have said, I have the phone number of the pharmacy there in Rome. Maybe what I could do is just give them a call, and see if I could get my prescription refilled and have them ship it to me. What happens is, and the gentleman has it behind him there, there is another chart, what our FDA does when that drug comes into the United States, even though it clearly is the same drug, made by the same company in the same plant, what our own FDA does is they send a threatening letter to that senior citizen or to any citizen, as a matter of fact, who happens to be importing drugs, and this letter is one of the most threatening letters.…”