Time for a Showdown With Big Pharma: Chairman Sanders vs. Sky-High Drug Prices (Opinion by Nader)

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Senator Sanders has taken busloads of Vermonters to Canada to buy the same medicines sold in the U.S. at much cheaper prices just over the Canadian border. During his presidential campaigns, he assailed high drug prices and supported single-payer or full Medicare-for-All. The latter, he has told the pro-single-payer group, Physicians for a National Health Program, is off the table. Astonishingly, he is not going to push it. That leaves the drug companies on which to focus his power.

Big Pharma is ready for Bernie’s thunderous denunciations. As witnesses, Pharma executives play humble rope-a-dope and exude courtesy. Their 500 full-time lobbyists outnumber the members of the Senate, and Big Pharma’s backup brigades of corporate lawyers, propagandists and local chambers of commerce add to the power imbalance. They’ve survived Congressional table-thumping for decades by both Democrats and Republicans, knowing that it is largely all theatre.

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Here is a solution. Since the NIH R&D programs have developed many drugs to the clinical trial level, let NIH proceed to manufacture these drugs in the good old USA and market them through government health programs.

There is a precedent from the Pentagon during the Vietnam War when the second leading cause of hospitalization for U.S. soldiers there was malaria. The drug companies were not willing to invest in developing anti-malarial medicines (not enough profit). The Pentagon set up its own “drug firm” inside Walter Reed Army Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital (now the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center). For a tiny fraction of what the drug companies would have charged the government, MDs and PhDs produced three new anti-malarial medicines, plus other medicines, which were positively reported in peer-reviewed medical journals.

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https://www.commondreams.org/bernie-sanders-drug-prices-big-pharma