Bernie Sanders: “Mr. Speaker, there is not much I can add to what the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley) and the gentlewoman from…”

“Mr. Speaker, there is not much I can add to what the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley) and the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro) have already said. There is a lot in the agricultural appropriations bill which concerns me, but the issue that concerns me most is something that I have been working on for the last 14 months, and that is an effort to substantially lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country. I made a trip with folks from northern Vermont over the Canadian border over a year ago, and what we discovered on that trip is that prescription drugs could be purchased in Canada for substantially lower prices than they are in the United States. The widely prescribed breast cancer drug Tamoxifen was selling in Canada for one-tenth the price that it sells in the United States. In fact, at a time when the pharmaceutical industry last year saw $27 billion in profits, they are charging the American people by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, most of which are made right here in the United States of America.”