I didn’t get to see the Aunt of the Left and the Aunt of the Right argue about same-sex marriage, as I had expected, so I paid a visit to the Aunt of the Left last weekend. She has about the number of prescriptions that you might expect of a member of the Medicare set, and is acutely aware of what the different pharmacies in her area charge for this drug and that drug. Not so coincidentally she lives about two hours from the Canadian border, and occasionally goes north to fill the more expensive of her nostrums.
She showed me an e-mail that has been making the rounds, to the effect that big corporations call it “free trade” when they reincorporate in Bermuda to avoid taxes or buy components from China, but not when United States consumers want to buy drugs (often American-made drugs) from Canada or Mexico. Then free trade is dangerous; oh, my, yes it is. “You don’t know where drugs in Canada came from,” says Mary R. Grealy, president of the Health Care Leadership Council, a coalition of chief executives from large health care companies. “They could have been made or stored in third-world countries with no regulation at all.”
The same principle applies to salmon and Celine Dion, but where they are concerned we have somehow mastered our xenophobia.