After introducing bills to put pressure on industry giants, Amazon and Walmart, to adopt a $15 minimum wage for employees, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is now turning his focus to Big Pharma monopolies with a bill he will introduce in the new Congress.
Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., announced on Tuesday they would introduce copies of the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act in both the House and the Senate when Congress reconvenes in the first week of January.
In a statement, Sanders said too many people in the U.S. go to pharmacies only to discover the medicine they have been using “can double, triple or quadruple literally overnight” in price.
“That needs to change,” Sanders said. “The greed of the prescription drug industry is literally killing Americans and it has got to stop.”
The bill would incentivize drug companies to charge prices in the U.S. that are comparable to prices in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan.
If pharmaceutical companies refuse to lower drug prices below that level, the bill would give the ability to approve cheaper generic versions of those drugs, regardless of patents, to the federal government — therefore ending a drug manufacturer’s market monopoly.
The announcement from Sanders and Khanna comes a week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. was going to raise prices by between 3 and 9 percent on 41 of its drugs.
They worked in tandem to introduce the BEZOS Act in August — which directly led to Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos, raising the minimum wage for employees to $15 an hour in early October.
Sanders and Khanna followed that up by introducing the Stop Welfare for Any Large Monopoly Amassing Revenue from Taxpayers Act, or Stop WALMART Act, last week.
Khanna said the main difference between the prescription drug price legislation and the bills targeting Amazon and Walmart, is that the new legislation is proposing new policy as opposed to “inspiring” corporations to adopt the $15 minimum wage policy.
Khanna said this is the reason they did not put the name of a pharmaceutical company in the title of the bill, but he did not rule out that possibility moving forward.
“Both Sen. Sanders and I thought this policy was revolutionary and a pro competition way of getting prices lower so we thought it was a strong policy,” Khanna said, “but maybe in the future we will have to call out these companies.”
Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who has been a vocal critic of drug companies raising prices, said he plans to co-sponsor the House version of the bill.