I know there are a lot of issues that deserve to be addressed by the candidates at the debate tonight. Racism, gun violence, climate change, police use of excessive force particularly against people of color and those with mental disorders, income inequality, corporate criminality, etc. Each topic deserves a debate on its own. But we know that isn’t going to happen. A few people, mostly “journalists” and “pundits” and the occasional not a member of the media person selected at a “town hall” format to ask a question that is considered safe (i.e., not too radical).
And I know that I will never be one of the people who gets to ask a question at any of these debates, whether during the primary season or at a Presidential debate after the nominations have been secured by the respective parties. Nonetheless, recently I’ve given a great deal of thought to what question I would ask, one that would demand a specific answer regarding proposed legislation as opposed to mere dissembling and vague ambiguous puffery, i.e., allowing the candidates to say as little as possible of any substance with a maximum amount of wordy obscurantism.
Lately, one issue has directly impacted my family a great deal. It is also one that has been in the news, thanks to some incredibly greedy and immoral actions by individuals and companies that I will refrain from using any number of appropriate expletives to describe.
So here is my question:
If elected President, what would you do, whether through executive action, proposed legislation or the use of your office as a bully pulpit to bring the ridiculously high price the American people pay for pharmaceutical drugs down to the level of costs found in other countries?
U.S. prices for the world’s 20 top-selling medicines are, on average, three times higher than in Britain, according to an analysis carried out for Reuters. […]
The 20 medicines, which together accounted for 15 percent of global pharmaceuticals spending in 2014, are a major source of profits for companies including AbbVie (ABBV.N), AstraZeneca (AZN.L), Merck (MRK.N), Pfizer (PFE.N) and Roche (ROG.VX). […]
The United States, which leaves pricing to market competition, has higher drug prices than other countries where governments directly or indirectly control medicine costs. […]
n fact, U.S. prices for top brand-name drugs jumped 127 percent between 2008 and 2014, compared with an 11 percent rise in a basket of common household goods, according to Express Scripts (ESRX.O), the largest U.S. manager of drug plans. […]
Many of the biggest differences were evident for older drugs, reflecting the fact that prices are typically hiked each year in the United States, said University of Liverpool drug pricing expert Andrew Hill.
“It shows the U.S. drug pricing situation isn’t just a matter of isolated cases like Turing Pharmaceuticals,” he said.
The latest furor over U.S. drug costs was prompted by the decision by unlisted Turing to hike the cost of an old drug against a parasitic infection to $750 a pill from $13.50. It has since promised to roll back the increase.
The same medicine is sold in Britain by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L) for 43 pence (66 cents).
The prices for pharmaceutical medicines in other countries show an even greater disparity between what their citizens are charges versus what US citizens pay. For example, the same drugs were roughly six (6) times cheaper in Brazil and sixteen (16) times cheaper in India than in the United States. Indeed, in almost every other developed country in the world, drug prices are far cheaper than in the United States.
Personally, this year a necessary medicine, Modafinil, which my wife takes to offset her loss of cognitive function due to chemotherapy she received for her pancreatic cancer, was removed by her health care plan from its coverage (she’s on a Medicare plan because of her disability). The cost of that drug was already excessive. But the price we paid for a thirty day supply jumped from around $100 a month to around $500, and that was after we received a “coupon” from the manufacturer to lowered her retail cost.
I imagine there are any number of people who frequent this site, and many others around the country, who could relate similar stories about the increasingly high cost of their medications. And these costs are not restricted to drugs still under patent. For example, I take a generic medicine for pain, Amitriptyline, which jumped nearly 3000% last Fall – literally overnight. And that is not the only generic drug that has been hiked by rates far exceeding the previous cost charged by the manufacturers of generic drugs, a clear example of price gouging by the pharmaceutical industry.
This is a critical issue for people who don’t qualify for Medicaid, or do not have a gold or platinum level insurance policy with no high deductibles that limits the amount they pay for any medication to a relatively low co-pay. In other words, most of us.
Ps. My obvious followup question would be: Do you support the immediate adoption of a single payer heath care system for the United States, and if not, why not?
I hope this question – or some version of it – gets asked at some point in the upcoming debates, but as long as the people asking the questions come from the one percent, I have my doubts.
