This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The president announced he is considering issuing an executive order to put the brakes on rising drug prices in America, a goal that I support. However, allowing broad importation of medicines from countries where the drugs sell for less is a bad idea.
Proponents of importing drugs from countries who sell FDA-approved drugs claim it's unfair for American consumers to pay exorbitant drug prices when foreign countries sell those same drugs for much less. They are right. But the reason those other countries can sell those drugs at lower prices is because they set mandatory price controls on those drugs.
Importing drugs from other countries is not importing the drugs themselves, it is importing price controls that undermines our free enterprise system. It is an economic system that has made the United States the engine for innovation and economic growth that far surpasses the economies of the countries selling those drugs at artificially regulated prices.
New drug research and innovation in America is the hallmark of our medical delivery system, and the impact of that research creates high-paying jobs for Utah citizens and provides lifesaving therapies.
Utah has many internationally acclaimed treatment and research institutions such as: The Foundation for Biomedical Research, the Utah Genome Project and the Huntsman Cancer Institute. These life sciences companies rely on investors with long horizons and willingness to support years of research for a return on their money. Their goal is to attack disease, save lives and improve the quality of life for those with chronic illnesses.
America should have learned its lesson importing cheap, subsidized steel into the United States from China, Japan and Eastern Europe. It was devastating to our domestic steel industry, stole jobs from American workers, and ravaged communities.
My father worked for US Steel for 35 years in Orem, and I grew up in a wonderful community supported by the jobs from this core industry. I was the lieutenant governor of Utah when the Geneva Steel works closed in 1986, with the loss of thousands of jobs.
I was an active supporter of Joe and Chris Cannon in their efforts to revive the plant and testified before Congress on the devastating effects of foreign steel dumped in the U.S. market at below cost. The importation of subsidized steel from Asian and Eastern European took hundreds of millions of dollars from our economy and led to the eventual closure of Geneva in 2002.
With more than half of pharmaceutical/biotech research being conducted in the United States, we are the world leader in medical innovation. The United States has been able to earn this impressive title, in part, because we have been willing to encourage innovation and research with a drug reimbursement system that encourages research.
The importation of foreign price controls will rob us of those important innovations, and new risk-based investment into promising new next-generation therapies will dry up and go away.
The president and Congress should move quickly to enact real reforms that will do more to bring down the unnecessarily high drug prices. However, neither the president or the Congress should allow the "poison pill" of price controlled imported drugs that will destroy critical new research.
Most important, the president and Congress should hold foreign governments accountable for artificially suppressing the prices of drugs they make available to their consumers, thereby unfairly shifting the cost of the new research on the backs of U.S. consumers.
Val Oveson has served as lieutenant governor of Utah, Utah state auditor and as chairman of the Utah State Tax Commission. He was the National Taxpayer Advocate of the IRS and currently is a senior fellow on tax policy at Real Tax Reform Now!, a Utah-based taxpayer advocacy organization.