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PHARMA: The Democrats’ favorite Republican falls off PhRMA’s Christmas card list

John McCain’s version of the reimportation bill is worrying the drug industry according to Forbes. I don’t think reimportation is the big problem for much the same reasons that an E&Y consultant quoted in the piece doesn’t:

    Critics point out that it would be impossible to supply the huge American market from Canada. "The problem is, it’s not going to make a big difference," says Carolyn Buck-Luce, a consultant at Ernst & Young. There simply aren’t enough drugs in Canada, she argues, to significantly bring down prices in the United States: "You can’t force the manufacturers to sell ten times the number of drugs in Canada that they currently sell."

But that won’t help much to improve McCain’s tenuous relationship with PhRMA and the rest of the Republicans’ "haves and have mores" base. (BTW the "haves and have mores" comment was made by Bush in jest before the 2000 election. But many a true word spoken….)

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