The National Council of Senior Citizens, a union-supported watchdog, recently unveiled a report that drug companies will find hard to explain. The NCSC found that American elders are being ripped off by the big pharmaceutical companies.

And the outrage caused by the NCSC documentation of overpricing was relayed to the American people by the CBS documentary show, 60 Minutes.

The NCSC compiled a dossier about elderly citizens who are spending more than their incomes on prescription drugs that keep them alive.

But the outrage is that the drug manufacturers, American companies, are allowed to – and do – charge American consumers 30 to 300 percent more than they charge to customers in Canada, Mexico, and Europe. And this is despite the fact that much of the cost of developing many of the drugs was initially financed by federally supported research.

As the result of a law passed 11 years ago that forbids re-importing drugs made in the U.S. but sold overseas at steeply discounted prices, the drug companies can, in effect, charge whatever they want.

The NCSC report, in their Seniority magazine, lists some examples. For the drug Zocor, used to treat high cholesterol, American seniors pay an average of $106.84, while the same prescription costs $43.97 in Canada and $47.29 in Mexico. The arthritis drug Relafen costs U.S. seniors $110.99, compared to $59.59 in Canada and $49.26 in Mexico.

And the list goes on. Prices for Fosamax, a drug used to treat osteoporosis, bone degeneration of old age, retails for $169.73 in the U.S. as opposed to $45.01 and $51.33 charged in Canada and Mexico, respectively.

The high prices have forced many seniors to choose between spending money on food or on the prescriptions they need to stay active. It has reached the point where seniors and senior groups in states bordering Canada and Mexico arrange drug-purchasing "tours" across the borders.

And NCSC places the blame squarely on subsidized greed and political payola that results from big contributions from the drug manufacturing industry to politicians of both parties.

"The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association and its member corporations pump more money into congressional campaign coffers than any other industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The result is that members of Congress routinely look the other way when it comes to drug company price gouging," according to the Seniority article.

Seniors are really caught in a bind and the bind has gotten tighter because of the decision last year to kick hundreds of thousands of elder Americans out of Medicare HMOs that they originally joined because the HMO had prescription drug coverage.

An estimated 450,000 elder citizens were cast adrift last year, and many of them still cannot find a Medicare physician or another HMO to accept them – particularly in rural areas.

The NCSC urges the public to support a pending bill, the International Prescription Drug Parity Act (S.1191/H.R.1885) which would allow retail pharmacies to re-import discounted drugs sold overseas for resale to Americans.