A third major drug company has announced that they are cutting the price of insulin, but Senator Bernie Sanders says that’s just a start – he wants across the board price cuts for prescription drugs and he’s fighting to make it happen. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A third major drug company has announced that they’re cutting the price of insulin but Senator Bernie Sanders says that’s just a start. He wants across the board cuts for all prescription drugs because they’re making 2000, 3000% markups on drugs and Congress won’t take action, and the White House won’t take action. But didn’t I see Biden just last week doing a victory lap? Like he’s the one that caused the insulin prices to go down. I actually saw that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: He was taking, he was taking credit for that. And tell the story. Tell how it actually happened.
Farron Cousins: Bernie Sanders has, obviously, he’s been on top of this issue for years. In the 2020 campaign, he traveled with a group of American diabetics to Canada so they could buy their insulin. So he’s literally been on the front lines on this. And he had threatened, okay, you know, Sanofi, all you other drug makers, I’m gonna haul your butts into the Senate and you’re gonna sit here and you’re gonna explain to Americans why we are paying these 2000% markups and the rest of the world is paying a hundred percent markup. And so they said, okay, well, we’ll lower the prices. We don’t want to have to do this. We want everything to be cool. But that was Bernie that did that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Bernie made the threat and they reacted.
Mike Papantonio: He was the only one in Congress talking about it. He was the only one that came forward and so this is wrong. Now he’s saying we need to do it with all the pharmaceutical companies on all the pharmaceuticals. Listen, this is a product, but full disclosure, I am suing this industry. I’m suing them for anti-trust, price fixing. The complaints been filed. We’re filing those complaints all over the country. The fact that they’re lowering it now has no effect on the lawsuit. They’ve made so many billions of dollars stealing money from the American public. So, but the point is, what you’re gonna find in this case is they all knew exactly how to set the prices. There were meetings where they discussed issues. They sent emails, they sent all types of information from company to company and all of the prices went up in lockstep. A product that cost $7 to make was being sold for $275. And so, you know, thank you Bernie. You know, I guess Biden can take a victory lap for it. But at the end of the day, this is the guy that made it happen.
Farron Cousins: Well, and for anybody who wants to argue, oh, well, you know, they’ve gotta make their money back so they can make new wonderful drugs. Listen to this. Both the stock for the companies that cut their insulin prices, their stock went up and their profits went up because they were actually able to sell more because people could actually afford it now. So they made more money by lowering the prices.
Mike Papantonio: But we are coming after you, lower the prices, you have made so many billions of dollars, Mr. insulin companies, and you can’t run away from what you’ve done to the American public.
