Bernie Sanders: “the debate we are now having is an extraordinarily important debate; in fact, it will be one of the most important votes…”

“the debate we are now having is an extraordinarily important debate; in fact, it will be one of the most important votes we will be casting this year. This vote is about whether we stand with the American people, millions of whom are having a very difficult time paying their prescription drug bills or whether we stand with the most powerful and greedy lobby on Capitol Hill, and that is the pharmaceutical industry which has spent extraordinary sums of money to make sure the American people pay outrageously high prices for the medicine they desperately need. I wish to briefly examine a chart which talks about the very high profit margin of the pharmaceutical industry. One of the reasons why the pharmaceutical industry can spend so much money on lobbying, on campaign contributions, on advertising is because of the profits they make year after year. In 2004, drug companies ranked as the third most profitable industry in the United States with a 15.8-percent profit margin, which is about three times higher than the profitability of a median Fortune 500 company, which is at about 5.3 percent. This is in 2004. This comes from the Kaiser Foundation.”