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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It has become much more difficult to smuggle dangerous substances across our borders over the past three years, and this is creating real problems for drug traffickers.

While American taxes pay for much of the research and development that goes into creating the new, life-saving drugs, American consumers continue to subsidize the cost of the drugs for consumers across the world.

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.

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.