Here are three takeaways from her speech:
- Ms. Clinton explained that American tax dollars pay for drug research and support the Food and Drug Administration. Yet, “we end up in America paying the highest price for those drugs that we have helped to create. We have got to take this on,” she said.
- According to Ms. Clinton, a physician at a large New York hospital told her, “it’s getting to the point where I can’t prescribe certain drugs that my patients need because the insurance won’t pay for them — Medicare, Medicaid, nobody will pay for them because they are too expensive.”
- Ms. Clinton also criticized Foster City, Calif.-based Gilead Sciences for the high cost of its hepatitis C treatment Sovaldi. “It is so expensive that a lot of Americans are being left out,” she said. “And you know what really is upsetting about this is that [the] drug company sells that same drug all over the world at a much lower price to everybody else.”
More articles on prescription drug costs:
Why laws intended to illuminate drug pricing strategies will likely fail
Study: Amgen, Sanofi cholesterol drugs not cost effective, boost healthcare spending
Secretive board at Express Scripts determines drug exclusions
