TSA Office of Inspection Accountability Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I rise to discuss one of the major crises facing our health care system today, and that is that the pharmaceutical industry itself has become a major health hazard to the American people. The pharmaceutical industry in this country is charging the American people by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
The result is that one out of five Americans, including patients suffering from cancer who get a prescription from a doctor, is unable to afford to fill that prescription. This is totally absurd. The result is that Americans who are unable to buy the drugs that were prescribed to them become much sicker than they should have been, and in some cases they die. The result is also that people will end up in the emergency room or in the hospital at great expense to themselves and to the system because they were unable to afford the drugs that would have improved their health.
As Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, recently wrote in the Washington Post:
Why do drug companies charge so much? Because they can.
Simple truth. There is not a rational economic reason for that. They charge outrageously high prices because nobody is stopping them in this country.
The United States is the only major country on Earth--the only one--that does not in one form or another regulate prescription drug prices. What that means is you could walk into the drugstore and the pharmacy tomorrow, and you could find that the price you are paying for a drug you have been using for many years has doubled, tripled, or gone up 10 times, and the United States has chosen to be the only major country on Earth that does not address this issue.
Let me give a few examples, some of which have received a good deal of attention recently.
In the United States, Daraprim, a prescription drug used to treat patients diagnosed with cancer and AIDS, shot up in price from $18 a pill to $750 a pill, literally overnight, after this drug was acquired by a former hedge fund manager by the name of Martin Shkreli, who is quickly becoming the poster child for pharmaceutical greed. This same exact drug sells for 66 cents a pill in Britain, and Mr. Shkreli is charging the American people $750 for a drug used to treat patients with cancer and AIDS. That makes no sense to me, and it makes no sense to the American people.
Last week Congressman Elijah Cummings and I sent a letter to Mr. Shkreli asking him to explain why the price of this drug has skyrocketed by over 4,000 percent. Now the good news--or it appears to be the good news--is that Mr. Shkreli recently said he would lower the price of this lifesaving drug, although he has not yet indicated what the new price will be. But let's be very clear--this is just one of many examples of price gouging within the pharmaceutical industry.
I wish to give another example. In the United States the prescription drug Sovaldi, which is used to treat a very serious and widespread disease, Hepatitis C, costs $1,000 a pill--a thousand bucks a pill. In Europe, the same exact drug, made by the same exact company, costs $555 a pill. In Egypt and India, the same drug costs $11 a pill.
The cost of this drug has become so expensive that Medicaid and the Veterans' Administration--and many veterans are suffering with Hepatitis C--both Medicaid and the VA are rationing access to Sovaldi and other blockbuster Hepatitis C drugs to only the sickest patients. In other words, people in the United States are dying and suffering because they or the government programs they rely on--Medicaid or the VA--are simply unable to afford the outrageous prices this company is charging.
According to a recent article in the Atlantic magazine, despite rationing Sovaldi, the State of New Mexico--and I am just using New Mexico as one example; this is taking place all across the country--the State of New Mexico will spend an estimated $140 million this year on that drug alone.
I should tell you this issue first came to my attention as the former chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee when the VA requested an additional $1.3 billion for that particular drug--$1.3 billion for one drug. This is unacceptable and it has to change.
Last year, the pharmaceutical industry--shock of all shocks; I know the American people will be very surprised to hear this--the pharmaceutical industry spent $250 million on lobbying and campaign contributions, and they employed some 1,400 lobbyists. Well, that is what you get when you spend one-quarter of a billion dollars and you have 1,400 lobbyists on Capitol Hill. What you get is the ability to rip off the American people, to charge our people prices far higher than the people of any other country on Earth pay. And you have the three largest drug companies in this country making $45 billion in profit last year. So that is not a bad investment. Hey, just spread the money around on Capitol Hill--$250 million--throw in some campaign contributions, and the three largest drug companies make $45 billion in a year. Meanwhile, all over this country, one out of five Americans cannot afford to fill their prescriptions. People die. People become sick. State governments spend huge sums of money on these drugs because they are so expensive.
The time has come to say loudly and clearly: Yes, the drug companies make a lot of campaign contributions, but maybe, just maybe, Congress might have the radical idea that it is more important for us to represent our constituents than the people who throw all kinds of money at us in Congress.
It is unacceptable that total spending on medicine in the United States has gone up by more than 90 percent since 2002. It is unacceptable that the monthly cost of cancer drugs has more than doubled over the last 10 years to $9,900 a month. In the United States of America, you should not be forced into bankruptcy because you are diagnosed with cancer.
It is time--in fact, the time is long overdue--for our country and our Congress to join the rest of the industrialized world by implementing prescription drug policies that work for everybody and not just the owners in the pharmaceutical industry.
That is why I recently introduced legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs in America. That legislation is cosponsored by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and was introduced in the House by Congressman Elijah Cummings.
Specifically, this is what the bill would do: No. 1, it requires Medicare to use its bargaining power to negotiate with the prescription drug companies for better prices--a practice that was banned by the Bush administration several years ago. No. 2, this bill would allow individuals, pharmacists, and wholesalers to import prescription drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies, where drug prices are significantly lower than they are in the United States.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a comparison of the prices of some drugs in the United States with Canada be printed in the Record.
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Mr. SANDERS. I will give a few examples. We have a drug called Crestor that deals with high cholesterol. Here in the United States, we pay $608 for a 90-day supply; in Canada $160--74 percent less in Canada. Premarin for estrogen therapy is $324 in the United States and $90 in Canada. Nexium is $782 in the United States and $228 in Canada. Synthroid is $878 in the United States and $212 in Canada. It is the same product, the same company. It is not generic. These are the same exact brand name products. Celebrex--a widely used drug for arthritis--is $878 in the United States and $212 in Canada.
What this bill would do, in addition to having Medicare negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry--which would substantially lower the prices Medicare pays--this bill would allow individuals, pharmacists, and wholesalers to import prescription drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies, where drug prices are substantially lower than they are in the United States.
I live 100 miles away from the Canadian border. In 1999, I took a busload of Vermonters--mostly women, many of them dealing with breast cancer--over the Canadian border into Montreal. As long as I live, I will never forget the looks on their faces when they bought the same medicine they were buying in Vermont, in the U.S.A., for one-tenth of the price--one-tenth of the price. These were working-class women who were struggling with breast cancer and who didn't have a whole lot of money. They were able to purchase the exact same medicine for 10 percent of the price in Montreal. That makes no sense to me, and it only speaks to the power of the pharmaceutical industry over the Congress that we have Members here who vote for all kinds of free-trade agreements--they just love free trade. We can bring in any product we want from China. We can have lettuce and tomatoes coming in from farms in Mexico. But for some strange reason we cannot bring in brand name drugs from Canada. We just can't do it. We can't figure out how to do it. And everybody here knows what the reason is--it is the power of the pharmaceutical industry, their campaign donations, and their lobbying efforts.
Our bill does a lot more than that. We cannot in good conscience tell people in our States that they must continue to pay outrageously high prices for prescription drugs when year after year drug companies make billions of dollars in profit and year after year people in our country get sicker and in some cases die because they can't afford the medicine they need.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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