Bernie Sanders And Ro Khanna Have A New Plan To Tackle Prescription Drug Rip-Offs

It’s an attack on Big Pharma’s monopolies.
By Zach Carter

Excerpt:

The problem with prescription drugs is simple: The U.S. government bestows long-term monopolies on pharmaceutical companies, immunizing them from the forces of market competition and public regulation. As a result, Americans shoulder the highest drug prices in the world while receiving significantly poorer public health outcomes than most of the developed world.

There are a lot of ways to address that problem, but a new proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) would attack prescription drug price-gouging at the source: the government-granted monopoly that gives Big Pharma unchecked pricing power.

“No other country allows pharmaceutical companies to charge any price they want for any reason they want,” said Sanders. “Somebody in America today can walk into a pharmacy and find out that the medicine they have been using for years can double, triple or quadruple literally overnight. That needs to change.”

On Tuesday, Sanders and Khanna will unveil a new bill that would direct the secretary of Health and Human Services to authorize generic competition for any name-brand drug whose average domestic cost exceeds the median price in five reference countries: Canada, the U.K., Germany, France and Japan.

“The government is giving an exclusive monopoly to pharmaceuticals,” Khanna told HuffPost. “If a company abuses that grant by fleecing American consumers, then they lose that privilege, that property grant, that subsidy from the government.”

If the bill — dubbed The Prescription Drug Price Relief Act — were to become law, experts anticipate that drug companies would dramatically reduce prices rather than risk ceding market share to a generic competitor.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-ro-khanna-prescription-drugs_us_5bf3192ce4b01909c808652f