Sherrod Brown: “Prescription drug prices are priced unreasonably, unjustifiably, outrageously high in the United States. That is the…”

“Prescription drug prices are priced unreasonably, unjustifiably, outrageously high in the United States. That is the issue. Why are drug prices two times, three times, four times higher here than in other industrialized countries? Because the prescription drug industry can get away with it. We do not negotiate prices. We do not demand that drug manufacturers reduce their prices to reflect the taxpayer-funded portion of research and development. We do not make use of the collective purchasing power of 39 million Medicare beneficiaries to demand reasonably priced drugs. Two weeks ago I took a dozen seniors from northeast Ohio across the border to a Canadian pharmacy in Windsor, Ohio, where they paid one-half, one-third and in a couple of cases one-sixth of what it would have cost to purchase their prescriptions in Cleveland or Lorraine or Medina. What these seniors were doing out of desperation was engaging in a practice called parallel importing.”