Political Quotes

“I am very happy to be here and resolve a--I guess, celebrate the resolution of a longstanding wrong done to the American people. Senator Stabenow can correct me if I am wrong, but my recollection is that the ban that Congress put on Medicare negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies the way, say, the Veterans' Administration already does was a magical appearance of a tiny little bit of language, not in the Senate, not in the House, but in the secret confines of the conference committee that merged the two bills. It just slipped in as a sentence. Nobody took credit for it. I still can't identify who slipped that thing in there; but once it got slipped in, the pharmaceutical industry defended it with all the venom and power and money and muscle that they had. And we beat them. We took it away. Now, just like the Veterans' Administration, Medicare gets to negotiate and drive prices down, and that is going to make a big difference for Rhode Islanders with diabetes, with cancer, with blood clots, with heart disease, with rheumatoid arthritis. This happened because all of us--Senate Democrats--got together, stuck to our guns, and made it happen through the Inflation Reduction Act which came out of the Budget Committee, originally--the authorization.…”