(FinalCall.com) -- I first became aware of the high costs of drugs in the U.S. about 10 years ago when I went with a friend who lives in San Diego to fill a penicillin prescription across the border. She came out of the pharmacy with a whole bottle of medicine for $11, when just a few miles away she would have received only a few pills for the same amount.

Today, my community in Ohio, like many others near either the Mexican or Canadian borders, sponsors bus trips for seniors and the disabled to go and buy their medicine for a fraction of the cost they would pay here. When our elders can’t afford the medicine they need in the wealthiest nation in the world, we must recognize that something is deeply wrong and then do something about it.

The debate is going on right now in Congress, with both Democrats and Republicans unable to come to agreement on the best way to deal with this tsunami wave which threatens to engulf many families in our nation. Under Medicare legislation passed in 1965, senior citizens receive doctor’s services and hospital care. But prescription drugs, the fastest growing health care expenditure, are not covered and 38 percent of seniors have no drug coverage at all and must bear the entire cost of their own prescriptions.

In some ways, the prescription drug debate is a result of the success of the drug industry in its creation of new drugs to treat conditions that previously might have been treated surgically or might have resulted in the death of the patient. As the population gets older, particularly baby boomers, who are more apt to use medication than were their parents, the 40 million seniors and disabled persons now covered under Medicare will grow. Thus, some estimates for prescription drug coverage over the next decade top $800 billion.

That staggering cost is part of the reason for the stalemate in Congress over prescription drug coverage. But some lawmakers point out that just as Medicare has cut the cost of physician services and hospital stays, so, too, can it cut the cost of prescription drugs. Others point out that the Bush administration made a choice to cut taxes rather than cover prescription drugs and that we could have afforded drug coverage had we not cut taxes, half of which will go to the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans and little of which will be seen by average Americans.

Part of the equation about drug coverage is undoubtedly the political clout of the pharmaceutical industry. Public Citizen, the watchdog group, recently released a report showing that the drug industry last year paid 623 lobbyists, 23 of whom were former members of Congress and 32 of whom were former staffers for the two House committees now working on Medicare drug legislation.

In addition, the drug industry has argued it needs large profits in order to invest in research for future drugs, but has consistently refused to release data on how much of its profits are used for marketing, with growing numbers of television, radio and print ads for drugs. Clearly, it is not to the drug industry’s advantage to have prescription drug cost containment as a part of Medicare legislation.

The basic logic of Medicare still holds—that it makes sense for our nation to have workers pay for medical treatment in their old age while they are still working and can afford it. As more and more seniors and disabled Americans are forced to cut their pills in half, to take pills less frequently than prescribed or to go to Canada or Mexico to fill their prescriptions, we must say to our government that a nation that gives tax cuts to the wealthiest while denying medicine to the frailest is a nation on thin moral ice. You can contact your congressperson at the United States House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515, or your Senator at the United States Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510.