Many people most likely know a fellow Iowan who finds great satisfaction in tracking down the cheapest fuel for sale when it comes time to fill up the gas tank. Saving pennies on the gallon keeps more money in your pocket and somehow yields a psychological boost to those of us bargain hunters behind the wheel.

During the congressional recess in February, I met with Iowans in 27 counties during my annual road trip across Iowa. (For the record, the cheapest gas I found was $2.17/gallon.)

Whereas heavily trafficked metropolitan areas may have stations squaring off at every corner competing for business, drivers in small town Iowa may know which gas stations in the entire county sell gas for less. Healthy competition keeps things honest in the marketplace. And it helps ensure consumers don’t sacrifice quality for affordability.

Competition is the golden rule of a free marketplace. Consumers get to choose where they spend their hard-earned money. That’s why some Iowans may choose to drive to a neighboring town just to pay less for gas. Others may choose to pay more and patronize a mom-and-pop shop on the town square despite lower prices offered at a big-box retailer on the edge of town.

Consumer choice and competition are key ingredients of business and commerce in America reaching across all sectors of the economy. When it comes to matters of health care, it’s especially unsettling to identify a questionable business practice that turns consumer choice and competition on its head.

When a doctor prescribes medicine, it’s common to allow the patient to fill it with a generic version of a particular drug when available. Generics often achieve significant cost savings for the patient without compromising quality.

But the big drug companies don’t like the smell of competition when it infringes on their brand-name money making drugs. So they’ve devised a scheme to meddle with the marketplace. Basically, they pay generic manufacturers to stay out of their turf and keep a competing, more affordable generic drug off the pharmacy store shelves. Essentially drug manufacturers are fattening their profits at the expense of sick patients by delaying a generic drug’s entry into the market. It wipes consumer choice and competition out of the equation.

It’s illegal for oil companies to collude to keep gas prices inflated. And the notion that they do so anyway gets motorists fuming mad. But when drug manufacturers make an arrangement after a patent expires that forces consumers to pay through the nose for a life-saving medicine, it’s downright unconscionable.

Such pay-off agreements are nothing more than giant rip-offs for consumers. And it hits low-income, uninsured people the hardest. It’s exasperating the judicial branch doesn’t see it this way. Two appellate court decisions in 2005 disagreed with the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) position that these pay-off agreements are anti-competitive. Even the Supreme Court declined last year to consider an FTC appeal.

That’s strike three with the federal branch. That’s why I’m looking to score a victory for cost-conscious consumers and hard-working taxpayers from my senior position in Congress. Don’t forget, these cozy arrangements are forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for higher prescription drug prices in the financially strapped federal health care system, including Medicare and Medicaid.

My bipartisan legislation would shut down these types of anti-competitive arrangements that force patients and the taxpaying public to pay more for higher-priced brand-name drugs.

Getting generics to market sooner rather than later translates into big money. One study estimates health plans and consumers could save $26.4 billion over the next five years just by using the generic versions of 14 popular brand-name drugs scheduled to lose patent protection before 2010.

During debate on the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 which created the first-ever prescription drug benefit offered by Medicare, I secured a requirement that all drug manufacturers must report all proposed deals with potential generic competitors to the federal antitrust enforcers at the FTC and Justice Department.

As a long-time advocate for transparency and openness in government, I also apply these same standards of accountability to the marketplace. Secrecy and sweetheart deals made at the public’s expense throttle competition in the marketplace. And that’s just not good for consumers whether you’re pulling up to the pump to fill the gas tank or stepping up to the pharmacy counter to fill a prescription.