Political Quotes

“I rise to discuss one of the major crises facing our health care system today, and that is that the pharmaceutical industry itself has become a major health hazard to the American people. The pharmaceutical industry in this country is charging the American people by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. The result is that one out of five Americans, including patients suffering from cancer who get a prescription from a doctor, is unable to afford to fill that prescription. This is totally absurd. The result is that Americans who are unable to buy the drugs that were prescribed to them become much sicker than they should have been, and in some cases they die. The result is also that people will end up in the emergency room or in the hospital at great expense to themselves and to the system because they were unable to afford the drugs that would have improved their health. As Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, recently wrote in the Washington Post: Why do drug companies charge so much? Because they can. Simple truth. There is not a rational economic reason for that. They charge outrageously high prices because nobody is stopping them in this country. The United States is the only major country on Earth--the only one-- that does not in one form or another regulate prescription drug prices.…”