For the past two decades, pricing models of pharmaceutical giants have drained “trillions of dollars from the government” Natural News reported.
“Pharma has a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power,” said Trump. “And there is very little bidding. We’re the largest buyer of drugs in the world and yet we don’t bid properly and we’re going to save billions of dollars.”
Pharmaceutical and biotech stocks plummeted Wednesday after the announcement to force the industry to bid for government business.
“They’re getting away with murder,” Trump said at a press conference in New York.
The industry is the latest target of a president who’s made a habit of negotiating via Twitter. The Nasdaq Biotechnology Index fell 3 percent in New York, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology Life Sciences Index dropped 1.7 percent, the biggest one-day drops for the indexes since October.
Investors had been betting that Trump would be good for the industry, but it now appears the Republican has locked onto drug prices as an issue that hits many Americans in their wallets, Bloomberg reported.
Former presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have all maintained a monopoly pricing drug cartel in the United States, forcing the US government to pay outrageously high prices for prescription medications purchased via Medicare, federal health coverage plans and VA Hospital operations.
The utter lack of competitive pricing has been kept in place by an army of pharma lobbyists charming complicit lawmakers and bureaucrats to protect high prices and eliminate competitive bidding for prescription medication purchase contracts, says Natural News.
As a result, the federal government spent $324.6 billion on prescription drugs in 2015 alone. “Spending on prescription drugs outpaced all other services in 2015,” says a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid report entitled National Health Expenditures: 2015 Highlights.
The same report reveals that US health care spending has now reached $3.2 trillion annually, or nearly $10,000 per person, and close to 25% of GDP, meaning 1 out of every 4 dollars generated in the entire US economy end up in the pockets of drug companies, cancer treatment centers, hospitals, doctors and medical device manufacturers.
This is one of the reasons why American employees are far more expensive than foreigners, harming the economic competitiveness of US companies.
The mainstream media on Wednesday buried the explosive news about how Americans are being ripped off by Big Pharma, in malicious “unconfirmed” rumours of sexual misdemeanors involving Trump passed off as “news”.
Notably, Hillary Clinton’s campaign accepted millions of dollars from Big Pharma sources, and there’s little question that Clinton, if she had won the election, would have maintained the status quo of monopoly pricing.
