Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said it is not fair for Americans to pay higher prices for prescription drugs than other countries and promised to fight the high costs during a campaign event in Cleveland on Wednesday, reported The Hill.
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."