Comparison of S.80 and S.242 Prescription Drug Importation Bills

The Health Care Advisory Committee reviewed Vitter's bill, S-80 and made an attempt to compare it with S 242 from the 110th Congress and the NRLN currently supported bill.

Both bills cover very similar material and use a significant amount of identical wording but are very different in size, with S80 at 13 pages and S242 at 42 pages.  However, since the two bills are structured completely differently, what appears in a specific section of one bill may be in a completely different section of the other bill, or scattered in various locations.  As a result, it is virtually impossible to say how the two bills compare.

For Vitter, our questions would be these:   Why and how is this bill different from S242?  Can you explain why S 80 is a better bill than S 242?

S 242 had significant co-sponsorship and appears to cover everything including re-importation, which we are not sure if S 80 does cover.  Our reaction is to stick with S 242/HR 380 and see if Dorgan can re-introduce it in the 111th Congress.

As an aside, we did discover a CBO analysis on drug importation done in 2004 entitled "Would Prescription Drug Importation Reduce U.S. Drug Spending?"  The conclusion of that study is as follows:

On the basis of its evaluation of proposals to date, CBO has concluded that permitting the importation of foreign-distributed prescription drugs would produce at most a modest reduction in prescription drug spending in the United States. H.R. 2427, for example, which would have permitted importation from a broad set of industrialized countries, was estimated to reduce total drug spending by $40 billion over 10 years, or by about 1 percent. Permitting importation only from Canada would produce a negligible reduction in drug spending.

The whole study is here:  http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/54xx/doc5406/04-29-PrescriptionDrugs.pdf

Based on this study, might NRLN be better off spending effort on Medicare Prescription Drug Price negotiation, rather than pursuing a subject which seems to have little benefit, and has been introduced now into 3 Congresses without going anywhere?

Ed/HCAC