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I've always considered making it legal for Americans to import their prescription drugs a free-trade issue. Imports create competition and keep domestic industry more responsive to consumers.

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.

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.

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.

The goal of re-importation is to provide American consumers with access to drugs at the world market price - not the inflated price now paid only by Americans.

Up to now we have faced external problems in an isolated fashion. One of these problems is precisely the drug trade and what has been the result? A very weak and fragile position.

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.

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