When we talk about corporate greed in this country, there is perhaps no better example than the greed of the pharmaceutical industry exhibited by the outrageously high prices that Americans pay for prescription drugs.
In America today, millions of people are making the unacceptable choice between feeding their families or buying the medicine they need. Seniors are forced to split their pills in half and many have died because they did not have enough money to fill their prescriptions.
All across this country, the American people are asking themselves how does it happen that we in the United States pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs?
Why is it that nearly one out of every four Americans cannot afford their prescription medication?
How does it happen that nearly half of all new drugs in the United States cost more than $150,000 a year?
A few years ago, I took a busload of people with diabetes from Detroit, Michigan, to a drugstore in Windsor, Ontario. And there, in Canada, they were able to purchase the same insulin products they bought in the United States for one-tenth the price.
In 1999, 24 years ago, I took another busload of people – this time women with breast cancer – from St. Albans, Vermont to a doctor’s office and a pharmacy in Montreal, Canada. And, there again, with tears in their eyes, they were able to purchase tamoxifen for one-tenth of the price charged in the United States.
How is it that in Canada and other major countries the same medications manufactured by the same companies, sold in the same bottles are available for a fraction of the price that we pay in the United States?
Well, the answers to all of these questions are not complicated. In fact, they can be summed up in just three words: Unacceptable corporate greed.
Over the past 25 years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent $8.5 billion on lobbying and over $745 million on campaign contributions to get Congress to do its bidding.
Incredibly, last year, drug companies hired over 1,700 lobbyists including the former congressional leaders of both major political parties – over 3 pharmaceutical industry lobbyists for every Member of Congress.
Meanwhile, as Americans die because they cannot afford the medications they need, the pharmaceutical industry makes much higher profit margins than other major industries.
Yes. The pharmaceutical industry makes higher profit margins than the banking industry, they make higher profit margins than the corporate media, and they make higher profit margins than the oil and gas industry.
As the Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee I intend to do everything that I can to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially lower the price of prescription drugs.
For starters, I asked my staff to put out a series of reports to take a serious examination of the unprecedented corporate greed of the pharmaceutical industry. Last week, they just released the first report focusing on the exorbitant compensation packages that the pharmaceutical industry has given to its CEOs and other executives within the industry.
According to this report, "The Pharma Pandemic Profiteers," in 2021, while hundreds of thousands of Americans died from COVID, 50 pharmaceutical executives in just 10 companies made $1.9 billion in total compensation.
These same 50 executives are in line to receive up to $2.8 billion in golden parachutes once they leave their companies.
The reality is that pharmaceutical companies are experts at hiding the true scope of their greed.
They publish executives’ salaries, stock options, and perks as “reported compensation,” but fail to explain the true value of the money their executives take in.
For example, AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez’s reported compensation in 2021 was $23.9 million. But after accounting for the value of his stocks and stock options, that number jumps to nearly $62 million.
Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks’ reported compensation was $21.5 million, but with his stocks and stock options, that number increases to more than $67 million.
Incredibly, while Regeneron Pharmaceuticals CEO Leonard Schleifer’s reported compensation was $6.5 million in 2021, the value of his stock options brought his total to an astronomical $452.8 million.
Meanwhile, over the past decade, 14 major pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion not to make life-saving drugs more affordable, but to make their wealthy shareholders even wealthier by buying back their own stock and handing out huge dividends – $87 billion more than what they spent on research and development.
Now, we have been told, over and over again, by the pharmaceutical industry and their allies that if their executives are not allowed to make these exorbitant compensation packages, if they are not allowed to charge outrageously high prices for prescription drugs and if they are not allowed to maintain monopolies on the medicine that was developed with billions of dollars in taxpayer funding, it will have a chilling and stifling effect on innovation.
In other words, if Congress does anything meaningful to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, new life-saving drugs will not be invented and people will suffer. Or as Gordon Gecko from the 1980s film Wall Street would put it: Greed is good.
Well, let me respectfully disagree.
The reality is that a life-saving drug does not do any good if a patient cannot afford to buy that drug.
It may shock you, but there was a time when the inventors of life-saving drugs were not obsessed with making huge sums of money, but were instead obsessed with making people well.
In the 1950s, for example, there was Dr. Jonas Salk, who invented the vaccine for polio. Salk’s work saved millions of lives, and prevented millions of people from being paralyzed.
It has been estimated that if Dr. Salk had chosen to patent the polio vaccine he would have made billions of dollars. But he did not.
And when Edward R. Murrow, one of the great investigative journalists in our nation’s history, asked Dr. Salk who owns the patent to this vaccine this is what Dr. Salk said: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
What Dr. Salk understood was that the purpose of this vaccine was to save lives, not to make himself obscenely rich.
Now let’s fast forward to the COVID pandemic.
After receiving billions of dollars from the federal government to research, develop and distribute the COVID-vaccine, the CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, became a billionaire overnight and is now worth $5.7 billion.
Incredibly, Mr. Bancel is in line to receive a $926 million golden parachute when he leaves the company.
And he is not alone.
The 2 co-founders of Moderna (Noubar Afeyan and Robert Langer) are both worth $2 billion each. And one of the founding investors in Moderna (Tim Springer) is now worth $2.5 billion.
None of them were billionaires before the taxpayers of our country funded the COVID-19 vaccine.
Meanwhile, while nearly 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID and over 100 million became ill, Moderna made over $19 billion in profits during the pandemic.
It does not have to be this way. The reality is that if Congress had the courage to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, we could cut the price of prescription drugs in America by at least 50%.
How? By preventing the pharmaceutical industry from charging more for prescription drugs in the U.S. than they do in Canada, Britain, Germany, France and Japan – a concept that is not only supported by progressives, but former President Donald Trump.
I will soon be re-introducing legislation in the Senate to do just that.
How many more Americans must die before we finally have the guts to stop the pharmaceutical industry from getting away with murder?
That is a question I will be asking over and over again to the pharmaceutical industry during my chairmanship of the HELP Committee.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your continued involvement in our movement to take on corporate greed and fight for the needs of the working class.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
Bernie will never stop fighting to take on the billionaire class and end the obscene levels of corporate greed in this country. But he cannot do it alone, which is why it is very important that we are in this together.
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