Avast ye, me hearties! The plunderin' of Big Pharma's gold must be halted, lest they be made to walk the plank!
2023-06-23
Arrr, me hearties! The swashbuckling buccaneers of Big Pharma be pillagin' and plunderin' billions o' gold! But fear not, for I have a few tricks up me sleeve to make 'em walk the plank and lower the cost of our medicine!
Avast, me hearties! Our healthcare system in America be a treacherous sea to navigate. We be spendin' twice as much as any other nation on healthcare, yet we still have 85 million uninsured or underinsured people and over 500,000 households goin' bankrupt each year from medical bills. To make matters worse, we have a severe shortage of doctors, nurses, dentists, and mental health practitioners, and it's gettin' harder for patients to see their doctors even with decent insurance.One of the reasons for this be the exorbitant prices we be payin' for prescription drugs, the highest in the world! Pharmaceutical companies be chargin' Americans up to $424,000 for a drug that can be bought in Japan for only $212,000. This high cost leads to higher healthcare and insurance costs, increases Medicare premiums, and threatens the solvency of the program itself. Half of new drugs comin' to market cost over $220,000, and even more distressin' be the fact that over half of new cancer drugs cost over $1 million.
The pharmaceutical industry be one of the most powerful political forces in America with over 1,800 lobbyists on Capitol Hill and havin' spent over $375 million to lobby Congress just last year. They be able to set their prices to any level for any reason they want, and they do. But we be fightin' back! The HELP Committee has been investigatin' the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and passin' legislation to make low-cost generic prescription drugs more available to the American people.
As the chairman of the HELP Committee, I be introducin' legislation to require Medicare to pay no more for prescription drugs than the Department of Veterans Affairs and to cut the price of prescription drugs by at least 50%. We must come together to address the outrageous greed of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially lower the cost of prescription drugs. Let's do it, me hearties!