Sanders said Congress should authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies to bring down costs for Medicare drug benefits. “We should use our buying power to get better deals for the American people. Other countries do it. Why don’t we?”

He said there should be tougher penalties for drug companies that commit fraud. “We should pass legislation which says that drug companies lose their government-backed monopoly on a drug if they are found guilty of fraud in the manufacture or sale of that drug,” Sanders said.

To encourage wider availability of more affordable generic drugs, Sanders said Congress should ban the practice of brand-name drugmakers paying potential competitors to keep lower-priced generic substitutes off the market. Brand-name drugs cost, on average, 10 times as much as generics.

Sanders also would lower barriers to the importation of lower-cost drugs from other countries. Sanders was the first member of Congress (1999) to take Americans to Canada to purchase a prescription breast cancer drug at a fraction of the cost charged in the United States for the same medicine.

Sanders and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) are investigating dramatic recent hikes in the costs of many generic drugs. They introduced legislation this year that would force companies to pay rebates to the Medicaid program if generic prices grew faster than inflation.

Ultimately, Sanders said, Congress should uncouple research and development costs from drug prices by rewarding innovation with a prize.

Enough is Enough, Sanders Tells Greedy Drug Cos.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

The Senate opened debate on a proposal to allow re-importation from Canada and other countries of safe, low-cost prescription medicine. The proposal, cosponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, was offered as an amendment to a measure that would overhaul the Food and Drug Administration drug approval program. "Some years ago, as the congressman from Vermont, I put together what turned out to be the very first bus trip to take constituents over the Canadian border to buy lower-cost prescription drugs. That is a day I will never forget," Sanders said in a Senate floor statement. "We took a busload of Vermonters, mostly woman, many of them struggling with breast cancer, and we went from St. Albans to Montreal. I will never forget the look on the faces of those women who were struggling for their lives, when they bought breast cancer medicine at 10 percent of the cost that they were paying in the State of Vermont. The drug was tamoxifen, a widely prescribed drug for those people struggling with breast cancer.

"How do you have a drug manufactured by a company, manufactured in the same factory, put in the same bottles, sold in Canada for one-tenth of the price that that same medicine is sold in the United States of America? How can that happen?

"We should not kid ourselves about what this debate is really about. Most Americans understand that large multinational corporations have enormous power over the Congress. You have Big Oil running up record-breaking profits receiving tax breaks and corporate welfare. You have credit card companies with tremendous power over what goes on in Congress able to charge Americans 25 percent, 28 percent interest rates. Insurance companies are blocking national health care efforts. At the top of the list of powerful, greedy special interests stands the pharmaceutical industry. Since 1988, the pharmaceutical industry has spent more than $900 million on lobbying activities, more than any other industry in the United States of American.

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/enough-is-enough-sanders-tells-greedy-drug-cos