AMERICA spends too much on cars - especially expensive cars that we just don't need. When it comes to getting to work or school, a Toyota Camry - or even a bicycle - is just as effective as a Lexus ES, a BMW, or a Jaguar. There are already too many choices - yet automakers keep coming up with more. What should we do?

The solution: Ban car ads. It's those slick TV commercials and magazine advertisements that make us buy cars, when sneakers, a bike or even a rickshaw would get us around almost as well - right?

Not sold on the idea? You shouldn't be. We buy cars because we want to get to and from our jobs, our schools and our favorite stores and restaurants quickly, safely, and (for some) in style - not because a commercial makes us buy something we don't need.

Ads just give us choices.

Yet when Congress reconvenes next month, Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) is expected to file legislation to ban or severely limit ads for prescription drugs. In fact, Kohl - who's set to chair the Senate committee that oversees the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) budget - has gotten the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to produce a report on direct-to-consumer marketing of medicine.

The report, released last week, predictably argues that the FDA lacks sufficient power to curb drug advertising.

Kohl and his allies have long argued that these ads lead to higher prices and cajole us into taking treatments we don't need - thus reaping massive profits for drug companies.

The idea is that consumers simply can't be trusted to confer with their doctors to make informed decisions about their own health care. The big, bad drug companies' slick advertisements and celebrity spokespeople are turning us into a nation of pill-popping hypochondriacs.

It's true, those spokesmen can be very convincing indeed. Bob Dole, for instance, convinced nearly 40 million Americans to vote for him in 1996. But I doubt that even he, persuasive fellow that he is, could hoodwink men to fess up to phantom diagnoses of erectile dysfunction. What's he's done is inform people that help is available.

And America's biggest-selling drugs treat illnesses a lot worse than impotence. Forbes has a list of the 20 top-selling prescription drugs in America: The top five treat such "trivial" maladies as high cholesterol, heart disease and asthma. Others help with anemia, schizophrenia, depression and rheumatoid arthritis.

These are the kinds of drugs that companies want to tell us about. These are also the drugs that Kohl and his allies want to keep us from hearing about.

Leave aside for a minute the irony of so-called consumer "advocates" lobbying for patients to have less information. What do consumers themselves think about drug companies advertising their products?

* In May 1998, an opinion study by Prevention magazine found that nearly 75 percent of consumers believe that pharmaceutical advertising "allows people to be more involved with their health."

* In 2003, the FDA found that when patients asked their doctors about an advertised medicine, 88 percent actually suffered from the condition treated by the drug, and three out of four doctors agreed that the ad had led their patient to ask thoughtful questions about their treatment options - even if it didn't result in a prescription for the drug advertised.

Clearly, these ads are not about convincing people to buy treatments for illnesses they don't have.

In fact, direct-to-consumer advertising has a demonstrably positive effect on our health.

The National Center for Health Statistics has found that millions of Americans suffer from undiagnosed but serious, potentially life-threatening conditions. Research by The Manhattan Institute's Benjamin Zycher of indicates that "as a result of patients discussing an advertised drug with their physicians, 25 percent obtained new diagnoses of such serious conditions as diabetes, hypertension and depression."

Direct-to-consumer ads even offer a significant benefit for patients already taking an advertised drug. A follow-up to that 1998 Prevention study found that 31 percent of patients who saw an ad for one of their prescribed drugs were more likely to take their medicine as prescribed; 33 percent were reminded to have their prescription filled.

Keep these facts in mind the next time you hear Kohl or a "consumer group" railing about how drug companies should spend their money. (What kind of sense does it make to spend millions of dollars inventing a new wonder drug if you're forbidden from telling people about it?)

If the same standards were applied to the auto industry, we wouldn't need our cars any less; we would just have a harder time finding the right one - whether it's a hybrid with no air-conditioning or a Ferrari. And if it doesn't make any sense to censor information about our choices for transportation, it makes even less sense to keep us in the dark about choices that affect our health.