Finally, something Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump agree on: Americans are being ripped off by Big Pharma.

Sanders took a group of Americans with Type 1 diabetes across the border to Windsor this past week so they could buy insulin at a tenth of the cost they pay at home. He blamed the sky-high U.S. prices on “the crooks who run the pharmaceutical industry in America.”

Trump has also railed at the prices Americans pay for prescription drugs, and this week his administration proposed a plan to allow states, pharmacies and drug distributors to import cheaper medicines from Canada. His secretary for health and human services, Alex Azar, said American patients are paying “exorbitantly high prices for prescription drugs.”

But here’s the thing. They’re both right, and they’re both very wrong.

They’re right that Americans have allowed themselves to be taken to the cleaners for years by the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies charge the highest prices in the world for their life-saving products while Washington basically stands by and watches.

In the name of promoting innovation and the free market, the U.S. federal government tolerates what no other advanced country permits: it lets the drug industry set its own prices with almost no limitations. Not coincidentally, the American system also allows Big Pharma to wield enormous political influence through one of the biggest lobbying operations in Washington and massive donations to key politicians, especially Republicans.

All that leads to the situation where a diabetes patient in, say, Detroit may have to pay $1,000 a month for insulin at home, but by simply crossing over the Canadian border can buy a year’s supply for the same price.

Sanders and Trump are both quite wrong, though, to suggest the fix for this mess lies in allowing big American drug purchasers to buy in bulk from Canada.

This is an American problem that demands an American solution. If they truly believe their people are being gouged, U.S. politicians are going to have to finally confront the power of Big Pharma and figure out ways to bring prices under control.

Scooping up cheaper drugs in Canada sounds tempting for big buyers like Florida and the other U.S. states that want to do just that. But while buying Canadian might be a solution for individual Americans who live near the border, it wouldn’t work on a big enough scale to make a difference to the massive U.S. market for pharmaceuticals.

Simply put, Canada isn’t big enough. We don’t have enough prescription drugs available to meet the demand if American buyers were suddenly allowed to buy in bulk.

No wonder a coalition of 15 groups representing patients, health professionals and hospitals are calling on Ottawa to make clear it won’t allow any large-scale plan for Americans to import medicines from Canada. Big U.S. buyers could empty pharmacy shelves in Canada without solving their own long-term problems, while creating massive shortages in this country.

Clearly, that can’t be allowed. Federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor is right to assure Canadians that their access to vital medicines won’t be put in jeopardy. The government needs to leave no doubt in the mind of the Trump administration that its proposal is a non-starter as far as this country is concerned.

Trump has been banging the drum about high drug prices for years, but he’s done almost nothing about it. And the idea of buying cheap from Canada is an old idea that never took off, for very good reasons.

A better idea, one that Sanders supports, is to allow the U.S. government to negotiate prices with the drug companies. Amazingly, the U.S. Medicare program, which covers about 60 million people, is now actually forbidden from negotiating bulk prices; it must simply pay what the companies demand. Letting Medicare push back on prices, say many experts, would be a big step toward taming the industry.

That’s the kind of thing the Americans ought to be doing, just for a start. Almost every other developed country (including Canada) regulates the market for prescription drugs. Not surprisingly, their people all pay a lot less than Americans for the medicines they need.

At the same time, Canada is no stand-out in this regard. Prices for patented drugs in this country are regulated by a federal agency called the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, which says we pay about the median price in seven so-called comparator countries (including the U.S., Britain and France). For generic drugs, which aren’t regulated by the review board, Canadians pay the second-highest prices in the world (after Americans, of course).

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We could do a lot better. We could have a national pharmacare program that would ensure access to prescription drugs for everyone, and would include a national drug agency empowered to buy medicines in bulk and keep prices as low as possible. That’s what a federal advisory council recently called for.

Allowing big U.S. buyers free access to Canadian drugs would undermine progress toward pharmacare and be a massive distraction from the real solutions to the problem of expensive medicine.

It wouldn’t work for the Americans. And it certainly wouldn’t work for Canada.

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