Enough is Enough, Sanders Tells Greedy Drug Cos.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
The Senate opened debate on a proposal to allow re-importation from Canada and other countries of safe, low-cost prescription medicine. The proposal, cosponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, was offered as an amendment to a measure that would overhaul the Food and Drug Administration drug approval program. "Some years ago, as the congressman from Vermont, I put together what turned out to be the very first bus trip to take constituents over the Canadian border to buy lower-cost prescription drugs. That is a day I will never forget," Sanders said in a Senate floor statement. "We took a busload of Vermonters, mostly woman, many of them struggling with breast cancer, and we went from St. Albans to Montreal. I will never forget the look on the faces of those women who were struggling for their lives, when they bought breast cancer medicine at 10 percent of the cost that they were paying in the State of Vermont. The drug was tamoxifen, a widely prescribed drug for those people struggling with breast cancer.
"How do you have a drug manufactured by a company, manufactured in the same factory, put in the same bottles, sold in Canada for one-tenth of the price that that same medicine is sold in the United States of America? How can that happen?
"We should not kid ourselves about what this debate is really about. Most Americans understand that large multinational corporations have enormous power over the Congress. You have Big Oil running up record-breaking profits receiving tax breaks and corporate welfare. You have credit card companies with tremendous power over what goes on in Congress able to charge Americans 25 percent, 28 percent interest rates. Insurance companies are blocking national health care efforts. At the top of the list of powerful, greedy special interests stands the pharmaceutical industry. Since 1988, the pharmaceutical industry has spent more than $900 million on lobbying activities, more than any other industry in the United States of American.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/enough-is-enough-sanders-tells-greedy-drug-cos
It's good Hillary's finally getting on board.
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