On the Horizon      

Reading Between the Lines—Pharmaceutical Company Discount Cards
By Robert Hayes, MRC News, Winter 2002

At first blush it sounds wonderful. A major drug company, on the heels of the holiday season, offers a Share Card promising affordable prescription drugs to Americans with Medicare.

With trumpets blaring, the Pfizer Corporation, one of the world’s largest and most profitable pharmaceutical companies, announced its new program to offer $15 prescriptions to the neediest of Medicare beneficiaries. It sure looks like good corporate citizenship at its finest.

There are 40 million Americans with Medicare this year, and no one disputes that the meanest gap in Medicare coverage is the absence of aid to help Americans buy needed prescription drugs. If there is a moral imperative in health care today, it is that Americans should not have to go without prescribed drug therapies.

Without proper medicine, people suffer needlessly. The U.S. health care system winds up substituting less effective, more costly care that could be avoided with appropriate medications. Often, too often, people die prematurely.

Still, political gridlock, largely based on ideology, blocks a Medicare prescription drug benefit. So into the void steps Pfizer, offering a new, seemingly generous discount plan: pay $15 for a 30-day supply of any Pfizer drug.

But who is eligible? A member of an uninsured working family? Pay the full Pfizer price, or go without. Have a gross annual income above $18,000? You guessed it. Pay the full Pfizer price, or go without. And the Pfizer drug card is only good for Pfizer drugs.

Yes, it is bad manners to look a gift horse in the mouth, and yes, half a loaf is better than no loaf. So if you are eligible for the Pfizer Share Card run, do not walk, to get it. We are all growing older waiting hopelessly for this Administration and this Congress to come together with a meaningful prescription drug benefit.

But it is fair game to ask Pfizer: is that all? Pfizer spends more than twice as much on marketing, advertising and administration as it does on Research and Development (R and D), and receives almost as much in net income than it spends on R and D. It has been among the drug companies leading the explosive inflation in the costs of prescriptions. In 2000, the prices of the 50 prescription drugs used most frequently by the elderly rose by two times the rate of inflation. It is no wonder the stock of pharmaceutical companies soars on Wall Street and the Chairman of Pfizer can be paid over $40 million in 2000, not including the nearly $131 million he has in unexercised stock options.

It is even fairer to look to our national leaders and remind them that there is no true homeland security when millions of Americans suffer for want of medicine that we can afford.

Ask Congress, ask the Administration, if it has to be this way. Reasonable regulation on profiteering is the province of our national government. Especially when over $1 billion of our tax dollars are used to research drugs for which pharmaceutical companies get exclusive patents. Patent protections that are often misused by drug companies to extend their monopoly profits.

Fair drug pricing and a decent prescription drug benefit–not discount cards–are what Americans should expect and demand of their government.

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