\u003Cbr /> line-height: 150%;\">The prohibition on Medicare negotiation is utterly irrational. It is the law of the land for one reason only: the corrupting political influence of Big Pharma, including one of the most egregious revolving door arrangements in memory. Predictably, refusing to leverage bulk purchasing negotiating authority in purchase arrangements with monopolists leads to price gouging and dramatic overspending. \u003Cp style=\"margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; margin-left: 0in; \u003Cbr />\u003Cbr /> line-height: 150%;\">Gargantuan savings can be obtained if Medicare is empowered to negotiate. With a researcher from Carleton University and using 2014 data, we found that if Medicare Part D had been able to pay what the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) did for prescriptions, it would have saved $16 billion - in just one year. The savings almost surely would be larger now than five years ago. Moreover, there is every reason to assume that Medicare Part D, if empowered to negotiate, could obtain savings significantly greater than the VHA is able to, simply because of the scale of Medicare purchases.The Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act would end this mega rip-off. It would grant Medicare the authority to negotiate. If a brand-name manufacturer refused to agree to a reasonable price, the government would authorize generic competitors to enter the market and provide the product affordably, while paying a reasonable royalty to the brand-name company. The licensing approach avoids even the hypothetical problem of important drugs not being available. \u003Cp style=\"margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; margin-left: 0in; \u003Cbr />\u003Cbr /> line-height: 150%;\">Americans are furious about Big Pharma's rip-offs. An astounding 92 percent of Americans favor Medicare negotiation. The Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act responds to this overwhelming demand, introducing a dose of common sense and overcoming one of the shameful and corrupt corporate giveaways in American history. \u003Cp style=\"margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; margin-left: 0in; \u003Cbr />\u003Cbr /> line-height: 150%;\">In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump claimed that the cost of prescription medications is falling. In fact, the Associated Press found that Big Pharma spiked drug prices 96 times for each reduction in price. Big Pharma has baked constant increases into its business model. The Big Pharma corporations raise prices constantly simply because they can, without regard to the economic impact on patients, or even the fact that high charges lead to rationing of lifesaving treatments from insulin to EpiPen. \u003Cp style=\"margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 9.0pt; margin-left: 0in; \u003Cbr />\u003Cbr /> line-height: 150%;\">The Stop Price Gouging Act is the cure for this epidemic of pharmaceutical price spikes. It would remove the incentive for spikes by imposing financial penalties proportionate to companies' unjustified increases.","author":{"@type":"Person","description":"Newswire Editor is a Common Dreams staff position.","identifier":"25413159","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8zMjg5OTM0MS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTc4ODc3OTc4NH0.Kro-XRoA7MB_ddUbc_2x6KjtfCnnkFR_VUghmVRfeoE/image.png?width=210"},"name":"newswireeditor","url":"https://www.commondreams.org/author/newswireeditor"},"dateModified":"2019-02-07T04:00:00Z","datePublished":"2019-02-07T04:00:00Z","description":"Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen","headline":"Congress Must Pass Landmark Legislation to Stop Pharma Rip-Offs","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":"600","representativeOfPage":"True","url":"","width":"1200"},"isAccessibleForFree":"True","mainEntityOfPage":"https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2019/02/07/congress-must-pass-landmark-legislation-stop-pharma-rip-offs","publisher":{"@id":"https://www.commondreams.org/","@type":"Organization","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":"511","url":"https://assets.rbl.ms/32373543/origin.png","width":"1501"},"name":"Common Dreams","sameAs":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Dreams","https://www.facebook.com/commondreams.org","https://twitter.com/commondreams"],"url":"https://www.commondreams.org/"},"speakable":{"@type":"SpeakableSpecification","cssSelector":["h1",".widget__subheadline",".social-author",".body-description"]}},{"@id":"https://www.commondreams.org/","@type":"Organization","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressCountry":"USA","addressLocality":"Portland","addressRegion":"Maine","postalCode":"04112","streetAddress":"PO Box 443"},"alternateName":"CommonDreams.org","contactPoint":{"@type":"ContactPoint","availableLanguage":"English","email":"info@commondreams.org","telephone":"+1-207-775-0488","url":"https://www.commondreams.org"},"ethicsPolicy":"https://www.commondreams.org/ethics-policy","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":"511","representativeOfPage":"True","url":"https://assets.rbl.ms/32373543/origin.png","width":"1501"},"name":"Common Dreams","nonprofitStatus":"Nonprofit501c3","publishingPrinciples":"https://www.commondreams.org/publishing-principles","sameAs":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Dreams","https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0010146/","https://www.facebook.com/commondreams.org","https://twitter.com/commondreams","https://www.instagram.com/commondreams/"],"telephone":"207-775-0488","url":"https://www.commondreams.org/"}]}
Congress Must Pass Landmark Legislation to Stop Pharma Rip-Offs | Common Dreams
Congress Must Pass Landmark Legislation to Stop Pharma Rip-Offs
Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen
WASHINGTON
Note: Today, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act to allow the government to negotiate prices for Medicare Part D directly with pharmaceutical corporations and authorize generic competition when negotiations fail. Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) co-lead the legislation. Also today, Sens. Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) introduced the Stop Price Gouging Act, which penalizes corporations that raise pharmaceutical prices beyond the level of inflation. Senators and representatives introduced two vitally important bills today that deliver pharmaceutical pricing reforms that patients and consumers desperately need and demand. Public Citizen strongly endorses these bills and applauds Reps. Doggett, Cummings, Welch and Pocan, and Sens. Brown, Klobuchar and Gillibrand for their leadership.
The prohibition on Medicare negotiation is utterly irrational. It is the law of the land for one reason only: the corrupting political influence of Big Pharma, including one of the most egregious revolving door arrangements in memory. Predictably, refusing to leverage bulk purchasing negotiating authority in purchase arrangements with monopolists leads to price gouging and dramatic overspending.
Gargantuan savings can be obtained if Medicare is empowered to negotiate. With a researcher from Carleton University and using 2014 data, we found that if Medicare Part D had been able to pay what the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) did for prescriptions, it would have saved $16 billion - in just one year. The savings almost surely would be larger now than five years ago. Moreover, there is every reason to assume that Medicare Part D, if empowered to negotiate, could obtain savings significantly greater than the VHA is able to, simply because of the scale of Medicare purchases. The Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act would end this mega rip-off. It would grant Medicare the authority to negotiate. If a brand-name manufacturer refused to agree to a reasonable price, the government would authorize generic competitors to enter the market and provide the product affordably, while paying a reasonable royalty to the brand-name company. The licensing approach avoids even the hypothetical problem of important drugs not being available.
Americans are furious about Big Pharma's rip-offs. An astounding 92 percent of Americans favor Medicare negotiation. The Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act responds to this overwhelming demand, introducing a dose of common sense and overcoming one of the shameful and corrupt corporate giveaways in American history.
In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump claimed that the cost of prescription medications is falling. In fact, the Associated Press found that Big Pharma spiked drug prices 96 times for each reduction in price. Big Pharma has baked constant increases into its business model. The Big Pharma corporations raise prices constantly simply because they can, without regard to the economic impact on patients, or even the fact that high charges lead to rationing of lifesaving treatments from insulin to EpiPen.
The Stop Price Gouging Act is the cure for this epidemic of pharmaceutical price spikes. It would remove the incentive for spikes by imposing financial penalties proportionate to companies' unjustified increases.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
"European friends: Do not accept lectures on democracy and freedom of speech from an administration that denies the 2020 election results and is now suing and intimidating news outlets whose reporting they don't like," said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders urged Europeans on Saturday to "stand tall against right-wing extremism" after the American vice president
scolded the continent's leaders for not accommodating parties like the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, which appears poised for a strong performance in the approaching general election.
"European friends: Do not accept lectures on democracy and freedom of speech from an administration that denies the 2020 election results and is now suing and intimidating news outlets whose reporting they don't like," Sanders (I-Vt.)
wrote in a social media post after U.S. Vice President JD Vance used his address at the Munich Security Conference to blast Germany's "firewall" against Alternative for Germany, also known as AfD.
Vance's speech was praised by AfD leader Alice Weidel—with whom the vice president met on Friday—and U.S. President Donald Trump, who
called his second-in-command's remarks "very brilliant" as they sparked revulsion and open condemnation from European leaders.
The Guardian's Patrick Wintour characterized Vance's speech as "a call to arms for the populist right to be able to seize power in Europe, and a promise that the 'new sheriff in town' would help them to do so."
"Right-wing extremism is not just an American phenomenon. It's worldwide."
On Sunday, around 30,000 people took to the streets of Berlin to condemn Germany's far-right and specifically AfD, which has also been embraced by U.S. billionaire Elon Musk. AFPreported that "many carried placards with slogans denouncing" AfD, "which is expected to become the second-biggest party in next Sunday's vote."
One demonstrator, identified as 71-year-old Hannelore Reiner, told AFP that in the current moment she sees "a lot of parallels to 1933, to the time before the war when Hitler's fascism came to power."
"I'm afraid history will repeat itself," she said.
Sunday's protests came a week after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Munich to protest the far-right—and a week ahead of Germany's closely watched general election on February 23.
The Associated Pressnoted Friday that AfD's rise in Germany "has coincided with that of far-right parties in many other European countries, including Austria's Freedom Party and the National Rally in France, with which it has plenty of common ground."
"Weidel was in Budapest to visit Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Wednesday," the AP added.
Following last weekend's demonstrations in Munich, Sanders emphasized that "right-wing extremism is not just an American phenomenon."
"It's worldwide," the senator wrote. "We're in solidarity with our friends in Germany who are standing tall against oligarchy, authoritarianism, and racism—and the AfD, the Musk-supported party."
Fears that the United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis—or
something significantly worse—intensified Saturday after President Donald Trumpwrote in a social media post that "he who saves his country does not violate any law," a variation of a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Trump's post on X—the platform owned by billionaire
shadow government leader Elon Musk—came as his administration continued its sweeping and destructive assault on the federal government and workforce, running roughshod over the law in the process.
Trump's post Saturday was the latest brazen signal that the president doesn't recognize limits on his authority to impose his far-right agenda.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie called Trump's message "the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president."
Since taking office less than a month ago, Trump and Musk have moved aggressively to dismantle federal agencies and
remove any officials who could shine light on or obstruct their efforts.
Trump, his handpicked Cabinet officials, and Musk have also disregarded or openly attacked the other two co-equal branches of government,
accusing judges who have moved to halt or limit the new administration's actions of being Democratic partisans.
In
some cases, the Trump administration has actively defied rulings from federal courts, an alarming indication of what's to come.
Yasmin Abusaif and Douglas Keith of the Brennan Center for Justice
noted Friday that "the last time the United States saw widespread open defiance of court orders by elected officials was when governors in Southern states refused to integrate their schools after the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public education in Brown v. Board of Education."
"President Dwight Eisenhower—though he was no fan of the court's decision—ultimately dispatched troops to the South to help enforce the ruling,
saying, 'The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional process in this country, and I will obey,'" Abusaif and Keith continued. "The governors' efforts to defy court orders are widely acknowledged as one of the most shameful periods in U.S. history."
Frank Bowman, a law professor and former federal and state prosecutor, wrote for Slate last week that "with each passing day, the practical ability of the courts to stop, or even materially hinder, the catastrophe diminishes."
"If Trump successfully defies the courts," Bowman added, "the only remaining obstacle to dictatorship will be public revulsion, national popular protest, and the hope that such a reaction would cause Trump to retreat and, at long last, recall some fraction of the Republican Party to its constitutional duty."
A new Trump administration directive aims to "reduce our colleges and universities to the status of echo chambers, similar to those controlled by authoritarian states," warned PEN America.
Lawmakers and free expression groups voiced alarm Saturday after the Trump administration threatened to investigate and strip federal funding from public schools, including colleges and universities that don't comply with its
broad interpretation of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action programs in admissions.
In a
letter to state education officials on Friday, Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, wrote that the agency "intends to take appropriate measures to assess compliance with the applicable statutes and regulations based on the understanding embodied in this letter beginning no later than 14 days from today's date, including antidiscrimination requirements that are a condition of receiving federal funding."
"Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding," the letter states.
The letter takes aim at "DEI programs"—a
right-wing boogeyman that the Trump administration has used as a pretext to rip apart federal agencies—and declares that the Education Department "will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this nation's educational institutions," even as halts thousands of civil rights investigations.
PEN America
warned that Trainor's sweeping directive "seeks to declare it a civil rights violation for educational institutions to engage in any diversity-related programming or to promote any diversity-related ideas—potentially including everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration."
"This declaration has no basis in law and is an affront to the freedom of speech and ideas in educational settings. It represents yet another twisting of civil rights law in an effort to demand ideological conformity by schools and universities," the group said in a statement Saturday. "To enact government interference in the intellectual life of such institutions is to end the United States' centuries-long history of intellectual freedom in educational settings, and to reduce our colleges and universities to the status of echo chambers, similar to those controlled by authoritarian states."
Brian Rosenberg, visiting professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
toldInside Higher Ed that the letter was "truly dystopian."
"It goes well beyond the Supreme Court ruling on admissions and declares illegal a wide range of common practices," Rosenberg said. "In my career I've never seen language of this kind from any government agency in the United States."
"Republicans tell you they want to empower local communities and that states, schools, and parents know best, and again and again use top-down threats to achieve their culture war agenda."
The letter comes amid the Trump administration's broader assault on public education, including a push to abolish the Education Department altogether. That assault is expected to
intensify if billionaire Linda McMahon, a proponent of school privatization, is confirmed as education secretary.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency—which is currently
rampaging through the Education Department and terminating contracts—posted Trainor's letter to X, the social media platform owned by Musk.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a senior member of the Senate Education Committee,
said Saturday that "this threat to rip away the federal funding our public K-12 schools and colleges receive flies in the face of the law."
"I hope no parent, student, or teacher is intimidated by these threats—this former preschool teacher certainly is not," said Murray. "
While it's anyone's guess what falls under the Trump administration's definition of 'DEI,' there is simply no authority or basis for Trump to impose such a mandate. In fact, federal laws prohibit ANY president from telling schools and colleges what to teach, including the Every Student Succeeds Act, that I negotiated with Republicans."
"Rather than trying to make college more affordable or helping to improve our kids' outcomes, Trump is letting far-right extremists inject politics into the classroom at every turn," Murray added. "Republicans tell you they want to empower local communities and that states, schools, and parents know best, and again and again use top-down threats to achieve their culture war agenda."