Trial and error: why we should drive the drug industry out of the clinical test business.

• Author: Goozner, Merrill
• Position: On Political Books - The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It - Book Review

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It By Marcia Angell Random House, $24.95

A few years ago, Brooklyn-born Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) compared the pharmaceutical industry's large and well-connected lobbying team to the hated New York Yankees. He noted one glaring exception. Unlike the drug lobby, the Yankees occasionally lost.

Are things about to change? The signs are certainly there. First, the Bush administration's deeply-flawed Medicare drug benefit, which passed late last year after an unprecedented all-night session of arm-twisting, has proved unpopular with the public, and especially with seniors, largely because of the giveaways to pharmaceutical companies insisted upon by the GOP. Not only does the bill ban the increasingly popular importation of drugs from Canada, but it also bars the federal government from using its buying power to bargain down the price of drugs (as every other advanced democracy does), thereby ensuring that seniors will pay more for medication than they might otherwise. But more significantly, the rising cost of health care and its damaging consequences--from seniors unable to afford life-extending medicines to companies unable to hire because of rising health-care premiums--is shaping up to be one of the top domestic issues in the current presidential race. And one of the chief reasons for the rising cost of health care is the higher cost of drugs.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is already exploiting the drug angle, bashing the Bush administration for not allowing drugs to be imported from Canada. That attack has clearly hit a raw nerve with the public, which is why there's a chance that bipartisan legislation could be passed this year on this high-profile, if modest, reform.

But that's just one more sideshow on the road to true reform. On the campaign trail, Kerry is talking about everything from rewriting the Medicare drug benefit to fighting the skyrocketing prices of employer-based health insurance by having the federal government pay for employees's catastrophic costs. Should Kerry win, then, the hottest policy book in Washington is likely to be Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It.

Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, believes that many of the problems with (and much of the unnecessary cost of) our health-care systems derive from a single source: the pharmaceutical industry's role...