On the recordAugust 23, 2018
I am glad to join my friend in this effort because this fits into a lot of things we are trying to accomplish that Congress has done for decades--trying to give consumers information. Remember maybe 40 years ago--I don't think it is 50 years ago--that Congress passed legislation that you had to have a window sticker on cars of the cost of the cars so that consumers wouldn't be bantering back and forth between dealers, not knowing what they were dealing with. You can't buy gas today without going to the filling station with a big sign knowing what it costs. Even the pharmaceutical companies themselves want to educate consumers with these ads. I have always supported the advertising of these pharmaceutical drugs. They want to educate you not only about the value of their drugs but down to the bottom, and then half the ad usually tells you, if you take this drug, what the side effects are going to be, maybe implying that they are even life-threatening or dangerous. That is a very important thing to educate the public about. So all we are trying to do here is to have the consumer get the additional information they need if they want to consider that drug, because everybody ought to want to consider the price, just like you consider the price of a car. I try to buy gas at the cheapest filling station I can because it is just common sense, right? So that is what Senator Durbin is pointing out. This is a Midwestern commonsense approach to educating the consumers.…





