Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise today with my friend and colleague, the Senator from Missouri, Mrs. McCaskill, to inform our colleagues of an important development in the investigation underway by the Special Committee on Aging as we examine the sudden and dramatic price hikes for certain decades-old prescription drugs. First, let me provide the Presiding Officer and our colleagues with some background on our investigation to date. Given that 90 percent of seniors take at least one prescription drug every month, the egregious price increases we have witnessed on these older drugs that are no longer under patent protection could inflate the cost of health care by hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Concerned not only about the high costs but also about the potential risk that patients will not be able to access the prescription drugs they need, we launched a bipartisan investigation early last November into the causes, effects, and potential solutions to these massive and unjustified price increases. Our investigation is focused on four companies that recently acquired six drugs that were decades old--drugs whose patents had expired long ago--and then these companies, after purchasing these drugs, dramatically hiked their prices. The four companies are Turing Pharmaceuticals, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Retrophin, Incorporated, and Rodelis Therapeutics.…”