A town hall attendee in Maine took the opportunity to personally thank U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders this past weekend for pressuring pharmaceutical giants to curb the sky-high prices of inhalers, lifesaving devices that millions of Americans with asthma rely on to breathe.
"I do want to thank you because I just called last week to order my asthma medication, my inhaler. And I've always been used to paying $300, and when they told me $20... I was amazed, and I couldn't understand why," the woman said during the event in Bangor on Saturday. "So I did a little research and I saw where you and President Biden have been working very hard. And because of that, I now pay $20 instead of $300."
In January, Sanders (I-Vt.) and several Democratic members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee
launched an investigation into what they described as "efforts by pharmaceutical companies to manipulate the price of asthma inhalers." The lawmakers found that AstraZeneca was charging $645 in the U.S. for the same inhaler it was selling for less than $50 in the United Kingdom.
By March, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and Boehringer Ingelheim—the three largest manufacturers of inhalers in the world—had
each agreed to cap the out-of-pocket costs of their inhalers at $35. The price-cap announcements also came after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenged some of the companies' inhaler-related patents, accusing the firms of abusing the patent system to prevent generic competition and keep prices elevated.
"Wanna know why I've worked for Bernie Sanders for 25 years? Moments like this," Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director,
wrote in response to the interaction in Bangor. "Hearing a woman tell Bernie the cost of her inhaler fell from $300 to $20 and knowing she is one of the millions with asthma who benefited financially from our efforts to take on the greed of Big Pharma."
Watch the interaction between Sanders and the local resident:
Sanders' event in Bangor was part of a weekend swing through Maine and New Hampshire aimed at rallying "working-class voters around an aggressive progressive agenda," as the senator's team put it.
During a rally in Portland, Maine on Saturday, Sanders
formally backed Vice President Kamala Harris' bid for the White House and said that "the progressive movement... has got to do everything we can to get out on the streets, to knock on doors, get on phones, get on social media, and do everything that we can" to help her defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump in November.
Sanders has urged Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, to place a working-class agenda
at the heart of her presidential campaign as tens of millions of people across the United States struggle to afford housing, food, medicine, and other necessities as living costs remain high and wage growth slows.
"Homelessness, already at a record high last year, appears to be worsening among people with jobs, as housing becomes further out of reach for low-wage earners,"
The Washington Postnoted Sunday. "The latest round of point-in-time counts—a tally of people without homes on one given night—shows a discernible uptick in homelessness in many parts of the United States, including Southeast Texas (up 61% from a year ago), Rhode Island (up 35%) and northeast Tennessee (up 20%)."
The local
Portland Press Heraldreported that Sanders used his Saturday rally to push "Harris and other lawmakers to support—and voters to demand—a slew of progressive policies," including Medicare for All, a federal minimum wage increase, and a revival of the boosted child tax credit that briefly cut U.S. childhood poverty in half.
"We have more income and wealth inequality than we've had in the history of this country," Sanders said. "Sixty percent of our people are living paycheck-to-paycheck. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation on Earth. We are the only major nation not to have a national healthcare system."
