A pressure campaign spearheaded by Senator Bernie Sanders led to one
pharmaceutical company backing off of their plans to price gouge Americans,
which is great news.
Now, Sanders is the head of the health, education, labor and
pensions committee in the senate of course, and has the power to call for
hearings and investigations into the health care industry and big pharma.
And so here's the issue at play.
Here's what fired him up and
what ended up happening when he decided to apply pressure.
Moderna had recently announced that they
planned to increase the price of the coronavirus vaccine.
So that would increase the price of the shots from $110 to $130 a dose.
The price of course has been nothing, zero, because the federal government
had been purchasing the shots on behalf of Americans.
So Americans can get it for free.
They were purchasing the shots for $26 from Moderna and
then you would go to a CVS or Walgreens or wherever you got your vaccine and
you'd get the shot without having to pay for it.
Now, of course, the COVID related emergency measures are going to expire and
at that point the federal government's gonna do nothing for you pretty much.
And so Moderna was planning on using that as an opportunity to increase their
prices for the vaccine.
But Bernie Sanders was like, no, I'm not done with that.
And here is why.
Sanders said Moderna, whose only federally approved drug is the coronavirus
vaccine that the company received nearly $2 billion in direct federal money
to develop, is a poster child for the greed of the pharmaceutical industry.
He plans to argue that the CEO Stephane Bancel,
who Forbes estimates is worth $5 billion, and
several other Moderna executives profited off the pandemic.
And that's actually true.
Also, fun fact the CEO sold more than $400 million in company
stock from the start of the pandemic through March of 2022.
The COVID vaccine, I should note,
is literally currently Moderna's only commercially available product.
So that's the only way the company is really making a lot of money.
And so him selling stocks like this I think is telling.
But anyway, Cenk.
>> Yeah, so look, there's three set of facts that lead to one another.
First of all, how much money do these
companies spend in lobbying these politicians?
So over the past 25 years of pharmaceutical industry has spent
$8.5 billion on lobbying.
8.5 billion.
That's not on a product, that's on lobbying politicians to do what they want.
So they must be getting a lot of money in return.
Hold, we're gonna show you how much they're gonna get.
And they also spend another $745 million on campaign contributions.
Those are the legalized bribes.
They just hand to the politicians, let alone all that lobbying effort,
which is a lot of times gets funneled to their actual bank accounts, right?
My wife, my son happens to be a lobbyist.
There's 1000 different tricks.
In fact, this one industry has 1700 lobbyists.
There's only 535 members of Congress.
So three times as many lobbyists for this one industry as members of Congress.
>> That's right. >> Okay, so
all that lobbying, what does it get them?
Well, first of all, in the case of Moderna, not true for
all the pharmaceutical companies that did the vaccine, but in Moderna's case, well,
the government did the researching and
handed them a couple of billion dollars of research for free, right?
So you spend a couple $100 million lobbying to if you're gonna get a couple
billion back.
But hold, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
We extend their patents and
that allows them to have literally monopolies in markets.
And there's so many other ways that the government helps them,
including not being able to negotiate drug prices at Medicare.
It's unheard of in capitalism that you can't negotiate drug or
the price of anything, right?
So how much money have they made between 2000 and
2018 pharmaceutical companies in this country alone?
Eight trillion in profits.
Not revenue, profits.
Eight trillion.
Well, that's what happens when you have a monopoly.
You could charge ridiculous prices.
In fact, in this particular case, in the COVID vaccine, and
I told they were trying to charge $130 per shot, right?
You know how much it costs?
$2.85 to manufacture.
>> I mean, they're just so ridiculous.
I mean, this is what they do.
This is if they can buy the politicians and game the system, they're gonna do it.
And that's what's been happening.
Except there's one politician who has proven over and
over again that he can't be bought.
That's Senator Bernie Sanders,
who is now the head of this incredibly important committee within the Senate.
And so he tells the Washington Post this, and I just love the way he simply
states the reality of how corporations screw us over in this country.
We're going to ask them, he says, when he's referring to the hearing, hey,
you made billions of dollars in profit on a vaccine that was developed because of
taxpayer support from the National Institutes of Health,
you've become a multibillionaire and you think it's appropriate to cost the federal
government even more money by quadrupling prices?
Now, here's the other thing I wanted to mention.
So Moderna didn't like the pressure campaign.
And so they decided to concede to Sanders, okay?
So let's get to that, all right?
On Wednesday after its CEO did agree to appear in front of the committee
in the Senate, he said that they will provide millions of uninsured and
underinsured Americans the vaccine free of cost.
And then he says, a spokesperson for Moderna says this,
everyone in the United States will have access to Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines
regardless of their ability to pay.
And then they made the argument that for those who are insured,
they'll be covered by their insurance, right?
Except Bernie Sanders made such a perfect point.
He's, yeah, except for those who are on Medicare because remember,
Medicare is funded by the taxpayers.
So if Medicare is paying for the vaccine at the end of the day,
it's still the taxpayers are paying for the vaccine.
>> Yeah.
So, how did Bernie do it?
How did he get this company to back down and
go from trying to charge $130 per shot to $0 per shot?
I mean, that is a hell of a thing.
I thought, my God, they need this money.
Otherwise you just can't stay in business, right?
That's the excuses they use.
They use any excuse like we need that extra money for
innovation in the drug industry.
You have eight trillion in profits.
How is that not cover innovation, right?
So what Bernie did was he pointed out their salaries not just their
profits, okay?
But he said that the top 50 executives in the ten pharmaceutical companies,
made $1.9 billion in compensation and stock awards, okay?
>> My God.
>> And they also have golden parachutes when they leave.
I mean, you guys get this at your job when they fire you or you leave,
they give you a golden parachute?
They're like, okay, thank you for working here, you're fired.
But here's $30 million.
>> I mean I'll take a bronze parachute.
>> Okay, right, so how much are these guys gonna get?
Now, remember there's just 50 executives.
Their golden parachutes when they leave amount to more than 2.8 billion dollars.
>> Thats seems fair, yeah.
>> Okay, so when he started talking about the billions that the executives
are taking and stuff into their pockets by overcharging us and
called him into in front of the committee,
now the guy's gonna have to say it in front of the TV cameras, right?
And he's naturally thinks, rightfully thinks, hey man,
there's a robbery well done.
The extra billion I would make is not that important.
I just got to protect the billions that are already made.
Okay, forget it.
Forget it. It's free.
It's free, right?
>> And look, I wanna be clear if you're one of those people who unfortunately has
been propagandized into thinking that you shouldn't get the vaccine,
it's not just about the vaccine.
Because this is something this issue has been replicated over and
over and over again with all sorts of lifesaving prescription drugs.
The taxpayers fund the research and development for the drugs,
the pharmaceutical companies benefit from it.
They turn around and
price gouge us on the incredibly important life saving medications that we need.
It happens over and over and over again.
My mom was diagnosed with blood cancer just last year.
She needed to take a chemo medication known as Revlimid.
Revlimid was founded decades and decades and decades ago.
But the federal government, which is completely captured by the pharmaceutical
companies, kept extending the patent extending, extending, extending.
Luckily they finally allowed for one other company to create a generic version of it.
But there's only two companies producing this life saving drug that my mom needs.
Her body doesn't produce.
Her bone marrow doesn't produce hemoglobin.
Without it she's gone.
And the cost out of pocket, okay?
Medicare didn't cover it entirely.
$2,500 a month for that drug, okay?
It's disgusting.
It's what we see happening with all sorts of drugs and Bernie Sanders holding this
guy's feet to the fire again isn't just about the vaccine.
It's about making a statement about how things work in this country.
How the corruption leads to this robbery of the American people.
And then one final thing I'll say, you should really compare Democrats and
Republicans when it comes to the investigations they're prioritizing.
So when you go to the House of Representatives which is now dominated
by Republicans,
they're gonna do investigations too on Hunter Biden's laptop, okay?
In the Senate you have Bernie Sanders doing investigations and hearings of
pharmaceutical companies that have been screwing you over for decades, okay?
Bill Cassidy who's a Republican from Louisiana says this,
the ranking Republican on his committee, Senator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana
told the Washington Post this month that he wanted to hear more from Pfizer and
Moderna before passing judgment on their decisions to hike prices.
>> In other words, I get paid by them and I'm gonna protect them.
>> Bingo.
>> There isn't a single Republican senator who isn't a crook.
They all take millions in campaign contributions and
represent those corporations instead of you guys.
By the way, it's also true of the majority of Democrats, okay?
So that leads me to my final two points.
Look, on top of being a talk show host here, I run the company so
I'm a businessman.
So I know how this works, okay?
So you're supposed to try to hit a 15% margin so
that you can be sustainable, etc.
You get a 25% margin, you do run a great business, congrats brother,
you did well, right?
That price hike from $2.85 cents to $130,
you know what the profit margin on that is?
Not the price hike, but the fact that it cost them only 2.85 and
they wanted to charge 130, that's a 4500% margin.
[LAUGH]. That's not capitalism.
No one can get a 4500% return on investment.
No one could have that kind of margin, unless you've captured the government.
And then at that point the government helps protect your outrageous price
gouging of the American people.
And what did Biden do?
So, of course, Trump when he was campaigning said, I'm gonna write,
I'm gonna make sure that Medicare negotiates drug prices.
And then he got in office, he's like, no, I'm not doing that man.
It turns out they give a lot of money to me, right?
And what did Biden do?
I'm gonna, [INAUDIBLE].
Obama same thing.
I'm gonna make sure they're gonna negotiate drug prices.
Liars, they're all liars.
And instead he came in and he regulated the insulin for
only people on Medicare and nine other drugs like what is it?
Three, four years from now, okay?
And the thousands of other drugs.
He's, don't, don't touch the beloved pharmaceutical companies,
we're gonna protect their profits and
pretend we did something when all we did was a smokescreen to help them out.
Who's the only guy who actually fights for you and gets things done, Bernie Sanders.
And so he singlehandedly did this.
>> Yeah. >> And
what do we tell you guys all the time?
Public pressure works.
The reason we tell the progressive legislators and
everybody else to pick a fight is not because of histrionics.
It's because it creates public pressure, right?
And that actually focuses people's attention.
It gets the people in power nervous, and they back off, okay?
This is a perfect case study in it.
By the way, even to Bernie, though,
public pressure against your colleagues would also work.
So I love what you're doing with the companies.
Thank you for being the only person in Washington representing us and
getting results.
But if you turn that iron towards your corrupt colleagues,
you would get ten times the results, 100 times the results.