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If Americans could legally access prescription drugs outside the United States, then drug companies would be forced to re-evaluate their pricing strategy.

Imports create competition and keep domestic industry more responsive to consumers. In the United States, we import everything consumers want. So why not pharmaceuticals?

America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs.

The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

I don't want to suggest that controlling pharmaceutical costs is the answer to what ails the U.S. health care system. It isn't.

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

In every country except - industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That's one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.

It is incomprehensible that drug companies still get away with charging Americans twice as much, or more, than citizens of Canada or Europe for the exact same drugs manufactured by the exact same companies.

Indeed, we must foster cost-saving competition. And that means joining the marketplace of other industrialized countries - not just for the manufacturers who sell drugs, but for consumers as well.

We've had a long wrangle with the pharmaceutical industry about parallel imports, and what we were saying is we want to make medicines and drugs as affordable as a possible to what is largely a poor population.