It’s taken Wal-Mart two weeks what it’s taken the U.S. Senate two years to do.

On Friday, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-North Dakota, released a scathing letter they co-authored to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The letter criticizes Frist for failing to schedule debate on their federal Pharmaceutical Market Access and Drug Safety Act.

The bill has remained in congressional limbo for two years, Snowe and Dorgan said, after Frist failed to make good on a July promise to bring it to the Senate floor for debate. The bill would allow Americans to order discount prescriptions from Federal Drug Administration-approved Canadian pharmacies, and U.S. pharmacies to import prescriptions from industrialized countries abroad for resale to consumers.

“Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, and they do so because the big drug companies have the ability to monopoly price their product,” said Dorgan. “Allowing Americans access to lower-priced prescription medicines from other countries would save billions, and would do so primarily by introducing a little price competition into the marketplace for prescription drugs.”

Have the senators been to Wal-Mart lately?

Before the stamp on Dorgan and Snowe’s letter was affixed, the nation’s largest retailer had announced it would fast-track its own discount prescription plan, after the overwhelming success of a pilot program in Tampa, Fla., where consumers filled approximately 36,000 new prescriptions in its first 10 days.

Wal-Mart will now offer 391 generic prescriptions – some 140 separate drugs – for less than $4 for a month’s supply. The retailer said the entire state of Florida would be offered the discount prescription program by January, with a nationwide rollout to follow in 2007.

“Wal-Mart can play a unique role in responding to the needs of our customers who have struggled for too long with the high costs of prescription medications,” a Wal-Mart spokesman told The Associated Press. “This introduces competition to an area where there has not been enough of it.”

Critics of Wal-Mart deride its prescription plan as a stunt to draw shoppers to its stores, but the chain must be applauded for proving what a free-market solution can do for the health care industry. Already, its chief retailing competitor – Target – has vowed to match prescription prices, dollar-for-dollar.

This kind of competition benefits consumers, which is the bottom line. And consumers aren’t left waiting for an act of Congress for it to happen.