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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Viagra falls
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- In 1999, when Elizabeth Dole launched her improbable campaign for president, political satirist Mark Russell used a reference to former Sen. Bob Dole's work as a TV pitchman for a new sexual performance prescription drug to explain what made Elizabeth run.
"If you were married to the test pilot of Viagra, you'd do just about anything to get out of the house," Russell said.
But now, six years later, it's no laughing matter for the pharmaceutical manufacturers of Viagra and its chief competitors, Levitra and Cialis. Saturation TV and print advertising campaigns over the last year and a half have meant only a modest 15 percent increase in sales.
If things are not working out in the free market, however, help is on the way from Washington. The Bush administration, so vocally obsessing about the imperative to reduce deficits, announces that beginning in 2006, under the Medicare prescription drug law, the U.S. government will cover erectile dysfunction drugs for senior citizens.
It is in trying times like this that one is grateful for the common sense of ordinary members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and colleagues on both sides of the aisle have introduced a bill under which Medicare would cover the cost of life-saving, not lifestyle, prescriptions.
Iowa, according to King, has the highest percentage among the states of residents over the age of 85. Of the 12 Iowa counties with the highest percentage of elderly, 10 of them are in King's congressional district. But he hears no demands from his constituents for their grandchildren to subsidize their romantic episodes.
"How can we urge young people, with raging hormones, to ideally abstain until they are married, but tell them they should work and pay taxes so that they can pay for senior citizens' Viagra? This represents a real-time intergenerational transfer of wealth," argues King.
Rep. Jim Moran, D-Virginia, a co-sponsor of the King bill, agrees: "Soon we'll have 61 million people on Medicare. There is a fierce competition for scarce dollars for medically necessary treatments of heart disease, cancer and kidney failure. It's unconscionable to require our grandkids to pay for our erectile dysfunction."
Moran still fumes over the Republican Congress' writing into law a prohibition against Medicare authorities negotiating -- as the Veterans Administration does -- the lowest price from the drug companies.
Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R-Minnesota, another co-sponsor, has led the fight against the administration and the pharmaceutical companies to allow Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and from Food and Drug Administration-approved facilities in 25 industrialized countries.
According to Gutknecht, "The Viagra policy reinforces the fundamental problem which unfortunately the Republican leadership (in Congress) and President Bush do not grasp, that this is an affordability issue."
The Medicare prescription drug law grows less affordable by the day. The White House assured balky congressional conservatives that the cost would be $400 billion over 10 years.
Barely 60 days later came a 34 percent upward revision to $534 billion. Now, this week, Medicare officials project that the first 50 years of the law from 2006 to 2015 will cost $720 billion, which you can be sure will again be "revised" upward.
It is true that in the Sexual Revolution, I was classified as a conscientious objector. But this argument is not about recreational sex. It is about serious public policy and scarce public resources.
To the pharmaceutical companies, the Bush administration and freeloading, free-loving geriatrics, it's time now to say no.
