Gilbert Gutknecht: “I rise and I hope to be joined by some of my colleagues tonight to talk about an issue that I have been coming down to…”

“I rise and I hope to be joined by some of my colleagues tonight to talk about an issue that I have been coming down to the floor of this House for more than 5 years to talk about. That is the price that Americans pay for prescription drugs relative to the rest of the industrialized world, and I have often said that we as Americans are blessed and we should be prepared and willing to subsidize people in developing parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa. I do not believe, however, that we should be required to subsidize the starving Swiss, the Germans, the French and other industrialized powers. Another point I always try to make is that this is not an issue of right versus left. It is not conservatives versus liberals. As I say, it is not right versus left. It is right versus wrong, and the issue really is that Americans are being held captive here in the United States; and the net result, very predictable result, is that whenever you have a captive market, particularly for a life-saving product like prescription drugs, it is inevitable that we, the world's best customers, would wind up paying the world's highest price.”