COLUMN: IN OUR OPINION

Congress should repeal an ill-conceived provision of the Medicare drug-benefit law that prevents the elder health care program from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to obtain the best possible prices.

Doing so would be an obvious boon for retirees

Under the law establishing the Medicare Part D drug benefit, the agency may not leverage the size of its client pool to secure the most affordable prescription prices.

A new report from Families USA documents the high cost of that prohibition. The consumer health organization compared drug prices paid by Medicare to the five companies that enrolled two-thirds of Part D beneficiaries last year with the prices paid by the Veterans Administration.

The study focused on 20 drugs commonly prescribed for seniors. It showed that Medicare paid 58 percent more, on average, than the VA. In the extreme example, the price of the cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor for Medicare was 10 times higher than for the VA.

The Families USA study debunks, once again, drug companies' tired claim that letting Medicare negotiate prices would decimate research and development budgets. For one thing, the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most lavishly profitable. Even more telling, the study determined that top pharmaceutical companies spend two times as much on marketing, advertising and administration as on research and development - and some spend three times as much.

Prescription-drug costs are a major driver of skyrocketing health care costs. Ideally, of course, market forces should dictate drug prices. However, a market in which the customer is deprived, by statute, of bargaining power is an invitation to gouging.

With the national deficit approaching $9 trillion and a hoard of retired baby boomers poised to put huge strains on Medicare, Congress should act at once to repeal the ill-conceived provision that bars Medicare from negotiating drug prices on seniors' and taxpayers' behalf.