Via America’s Lawyer: Representative Katie Porter tears into Big Pharma CEO’s for grossly inflating costs of life-saving drugs in recent years, despite their medications remaining the same. RT Correspondent Brigida Santos joins Mike Papantonio to explain more. Become a member today!:
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Members of the house committee on oversight and reform have blasted big pharma executives for price gouging, increasing the cost of life saving drugs for personal profit. Brigida Santos joins me now to talk about this. Again, Brigida, this is something we've talked about so many times and it, the story doesn't get any better, you know, if you take a look at it. The question that I have is, what has this committee actually discovered about the role of big pharma and CEO's in America's drug pricing? What have they, what could have, what can they put on paper?
Sure. Well, after nearly two years of investigating the skyrocketing costs of medicine in America, the committee has found that the CEOs of some of the world's most profitable drug companies are increasing drug prices simply to make themselves rich. Now, internal documents also show that these drug companies are targeting the United States for the biggest price hikes in the world, because they know that the federal government is legally prohibited from negotiating with drug companies to lower the cost of prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries. Now, according to the documents, the price of the same drugs in other countries are significantly cheaper because European governments are legally allowed to set those price limits. And Mike, to give you an idea of how big of a problem this is, in the US drug companies have increased the price of over 600 single source brand name medicines by over 21.4% between January of 2018 and June of 2020.
Brigida, as you know, I've, I've probably gone to major litigation with 45, 50 major drug companies, international drug companies to where I've had to get the drug either pulled off the market. I've had to get black box warnings put on it. I've had to get the FDA to actually do their job and, and uncover the fraud, the phonying up of clinical data. So I've been working with them a long time, but one thing we always find, we always find that document that asked the question, why can we charge more in middle America than we do in Germany? And you know what the answer always is, right in the document in writing, because we can, and I understand that's their attitude. I'm wondering which executives testified during that hearing. And I doubt that question was asked of them, but which executives actually testified?
The committee heard testimonies from the former CEO of Celgene and the former CEO of Bristol Myers Squibb, which acquired Celgene last year. Now they sell the cancer drug Revlimid and have tripled the price since 2005. Today one course costs $16,000 per month. Members also heard from the CEO of Teva pharmaceuticals, which sells the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone, and several patients who have relied on each of these drugs. One MS patient testified that in 2003 Copaxone costs $1,800 per month. Today, a monthly supply costs $6,000, which amounts to over $70,000 per year. That's more than the median annual household income in the United States. So these are exorbitant prices.
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. The pharma, of course, the big, big drug companies are lining up in back of Biden. They want Biden elected because the Democrats, if you'll remember just a less than a year ago, where you had Cory Booker, leading the charge to allow drug companies to keep their prices high, that came from the Democrats, it sounds like it's upside down. Now you have, now you have Trump saying, I'm going after the drug companies, I'm going to make sure they lower prices. It seems like it's a total flip on what we, what we would expect.
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