Mark Dayton: “when I was in Minnesota last week, I read a very disturbing news report about the cost of prescription drugs in this…”

“when I was in Minnesota last week, I read a very disturbing news report about the cost of prescription drugs in this country. The American Association of Retired Persons Public Policy Institute looked at the prices charged by the manufacturers of 197 brand-name prescription drugs most widely purchased by Americans. Last year, their average price increase was 6.9 percent, over three times the overall inflation rate of just 2.2 percent. From December of 1999 to December of 2003, for 155 of those drugs on the market during all 4 years, their prices increased by a cumulative average of 27.6 percent compared to the general inflation rate of just over 10 percent. That is a price increase of over 2.5 times the overall inflation rate during the past 4 years. It is not as though those drug prices were low at the beginning. Last summer, my staff compared the retail prices of 52 leading prescription drugs in the United States and Canada. For exactly the same drug, same amount, same strength, made by the same company, prices in Canada were one-third, one-fifth, even one-eighth the prices in the United States. That was after factoring out the different values of the U.S. and Canadian dollars. So in an apples-to-apples comparison, prices for the exact same medicines in the United States were three times, five times, even eight times higher than prices in Canada.”