While the eyes of the country are probably understandably focused on the former
president once again being arrested, there is a lot else that needs to be addressed.
And thankfully, we do have people like Senator Bernie Sanders who are doing their
best to address it.
Here I am talking about absolutely out of control costs of a variety of different
necessary medications.
And Bernie is getting pretty aggressive when it comes to his efforts to put
pressure on the Biden administration to finally do some something about it.
And it comes in a variety of forms,
both rhetorically like with this tweet that he sent out yesterday saying.
Now is the time for the Biden administration to take executive action to
substantially lower the price of prescription drugs and
to take on the corporate greed of the pharmaceutical industry.
That's good.
He should continue to put people's focus on that.
It's a reminder of how different this country would be had we gone with
Bernie in 2020 or even better, 2016.
But he's doing more than just talk about it.
He's saying also, I will oppose all nominations until we have a very clear
strategy on the part of the government as to how we're going to
lower the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs.
This is not just an empty threat.
He's the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
He controls when his panel reviews nominees for
positions in the Department of Health and Human Services.
So if he wants to shut those down for a little bit, for a long while,
he has the power and theory to do that.
Now, he says about this plan, my goal is to change government in general,
policy in terms of the pharmaceutical industry, and
demand that the cost of prescription drugs in this country are significantly lowered.
Politicians for years have talked about the high cost of prescription drugs.
Relatively little has been done, and it's time that we act decisively.
Well, the White House put out a statement about this plan but
I don't necessarily draw a lot of hope from it in terms of their willingness
immediately to comply with what Bernie Sanders has to say.
They said that they share his concern on drug pricing.
I'm sure, I'm sure.
Which is why Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act,
the most consequential law addressing the high cost of prescription drugs,
which would be a good point if it solved the problem.
If suddenly people were not scripping and saving to get life saving medication, or
just having whole classes of medication being effectively financially barred
to them.
Medications that are available and affordable in other parts of the world,
but in the number one country in the world are a pipe dream.
Jordan, what do you think.
>> Bernie is gonna be painted as a villain for doing something that, if successful,
would drastically improve the lives of millions of people in this country.
And the cost of drugs here are astronomical compared to other developed
countries.
And he's doing something and employing a strategy that is for
sure going to make him the villain among the Democratic establishments.
So they're going to say, he's blocking these nominations.
We finally can do these nominations now that Feinstein is back and
he's gonna block them.
So what?
Nothing meaningful is going to happen as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act.
But we should not do this because you want to appoint people to positions who
are ultimately not going to do anything meaningful there either.
No, this is an opportunity to do something about a very real issue
that both parties allegedly care about.
Do it, solve it, right here.
Here's your opportunity.
Let's do something about it.
Use the bully pulpit, go around the country and talk about this issue.
Everybody cares about it.
Almost everybody is affected by it.
And use that leverage, use this moment right now to do this.
But they're not going to because they wanna just make everyone think that
this one piece of signature legislation that they've passed is the be all and all.
And it's not.
They're really just gaslighting people.
>> Yeah, 100%.
Joe Biden is going, if he is the nominee or whatever and it looks like he will be,
he's gonna face a difficult path to re-election which is just let's stop for
a second to admit how embarrassing that is.
He's gonna be running against the guy who has been,
he was just found civilly guilty of sexual assault.
He has to pay millions of dollars.
He's on the line potentially for the hush money payments, for
the classified documents that he stole, probably for Fulton County as well,
probably for January 6th as well.
And he's like, Biden's narrowly losing.
It's absurd.
So one would think a politician would want to do something that is incredibly
popular.
And it is difficult to come up with something that would be less immediately
popular to more people, particularly older people who vote at higher rates than
drastically cutting the cost of their medication.
I just don't understand politicians sometimes, I mean, I do.
They don't wanna do it not because they question whether it would help them
electorally, but because they actually put the interests of the donors even over
the continuation of their own political futures.
It's absolutely insane but it's why so little is done.
We had Obamacare a decade and a half ago,
and then in the IRA you had a small handful of medications
that had small cuts to them, and that's it.
What was, Sicko came out 20 years ago at this point.
It is amazing how little has been done in this area.
And you have people like Bernie Sanders who in theory were they not constantly
undermined by their own side, attacked by the media, buried when they run for
president, could be setting the agenda on stuff like this.
Instead, it's wall to wall Bud Light is gay or whatever.
This is the actual thing that is ruining people's lives,
not that Target is selling rainbow t-shirts.
That's not actually stopping you from getting the cancer medication
that you need.
A trio of Johnson and
Johnson's HIV treatments cost from 25 to $56,000 annually in the US.
In other countries, it's 4 to 10.
You can go medication by medication on this.
There's two medications used to treat cancer.
They each cost $424,000 in the US.
It's 30% less in Germany,
one of them is half expensive in Japan, it's the same thing.
Did you know that your cancer can't tell the difference actually?
Your pocketbook can based on where you buy it.
But it is amazing that so little is done and so
few politicians even try to make it an issue, even try to run in it.
Any final thoughts, Jordan, before we end?
>> Also, in other countries, they have universal healthcare.
They have a government that covers their healthcare bills here.
So not only are the costs cheaper,
these people aren't going to go into bankruptcy if they don't have insurance.
They have it through the government.
That's what their tax dollars pay for.
Here if you don't have insurance, you're screwed.
What are you gonna do?
Scrounge up $400,000 for your cancer medication?
No, you'll just die.
And that's the system they want us to live in.
>> Look at Jordan acting as if GoFundMe doesn't exist.
It is the perfect solution to all of these structural inequities that we have
in our society obviously.