Bernie Sanders wants to remind you the pharmaceutical industry is still ripping Americans off
The pharmaceutical industry is enjoying a moment. It has gone in mere months from being one of the most despised industries in the United States to a reputational high, a regular recipient of celebratory headlines for the rapid development of vaccines that will end the covid-19 pandemic.
But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would like you to know the American pharmaceutical industry is still ripping people off — and he plans to do something about that. This week, Sanders introduced a trio of bills designed to help the United States get a grip on the price we pay for prescription drugs. (Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is the lead sponsor in the House.) These bills would, if enacted, put an end to the gouging of the American public by permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices, by pegging the price of pharmaceuticals to the median price in five comparable countries — Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan — and by allowing Americans to import drugs legally from Canada and other major countries.
These changes can’t come a moment too soon. It’s not simply that the high cost of drugs is roiling our politics, sending voters scurrying from party to party in a frantic attempt at a solution. It’s that our personal pharmaceutical bills are increasingly unaffordable.
Americans spend significantly more than citizens of other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on both over-the-counter and prescription medications. The examples are legion. Name-brand insulins — which many people with diabetes say work much better than older, less expensive generics — cost significantly less in Canada than in the United States, where prices have soared by more than 300 percent over the past two decades. People in both Canada and Britain pay a fraction of the cost for Epi-Pens as we do here.
There is a reason for this: No other first-world country besides the United States allows Big Pharma to charge whatever it likes for its products, because drugs are considered a social good and are expected to be affordable. Because we don’t, the Rand Corp. reports that drug prices in the United States are a walloping 256 percent more than other countries. As Sanders noted Tuesday, Big Pharma “has managed to create a situation where they can raise their prices to any level they want any day of the week.”
Without government action, people look to do-it-yourself solutions such as skipping doses or going without altogether to save money. As Elia Spates, who has Type 1 diabetes, testified to the Senate subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Tuesday, “When you pay over $800 per month for an individual in insurance premiums and pay an additional $2,000 per month till your deductible is met, your family starts to feel a financial pinch. The only way you see to cut back on the spending is to cut back on the insulin.”
This practice comes with a death count. Before the pandemic shutdowns, there were regular protests by parents whose adult children died after finding their insulin unaffordable. Cancer patients are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy protection than those in the general population and, if they do, they appear to be more likely to die of the disease.
There is a moment of opportunity here to change things. According to Politico, Big Pharma is — for once — running scared, thoroughly expecting something to turn up in major Democratic legislation this year that will finally crack down on its epic run of greed. If it happens, what will have brought it about? It’s not a sudden explosion of political empathy by those who for years stopped proposals like those made by Sanders in their tracks.
Instead, it’s that even the government’s pharmaceutical costs are so out of control that any attempt to bring them in line will help make the financial numbers of a future Biden spending package look better.
Many in Congress remain hesitant to embrace an all-encompassing solution, seeming to favor deals to help those on Medicare with co-pays. Perhaps they are gun-shy, unwilling to fully tackle the power of Big Pharma, which spends millions on lobbying every year. Perhaps they really believe, as is often claimed, that allowing the government to negotiate prices will stifle innovation. (If so, they are almost certainly wrong. The industry giants spend more on marketing and promoting their products than they do on researching new ones.) But, as Sanders points out, the time is long past for half-measures. The high costs of drugs are affecting everyone. The simplest, fairest and certainly most effective solution would be for the federal government to step in and take charge.
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