Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was asked about rising drug prices in America during a Congressional hearing on Thursday, and both his response to the question and the Senator who posed it were noteworthy.
“Why are pharmaceuticals charging so much?” Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) asked Azar, who was testifying before a Senate appropriations subcommittee.
Citizens of the US spend vastly more on drugs than their counterparts in the rest of the developed world. It results in nearly 19 million Americans every year purchasing their pharmaceuticals from Canada alone.
Left unmentioned in Manchin’s inquiry was that most other industrialized nations employ either single payer systems or robust public healthcare programs to negotiate lower drug costs.
Secretary Azar jumped at the opportunity to raise the issue, launching into an ideological screed against “socialized” health care systems around the world.
He specifically criticized Canada’s cheaper drug prices as resulting from a “foreign government that free rides off American investment.”
In some cases, Azar admitted, “foreign government socialist single payer systems get a better deal.” But, he claimed: “Often that deal comes at the cost of rationing and access.”
Azar, who is the former President of drug company Eli Lilly USA, went on to allege that Canadian patients suffering from serious conditions like HIV/AIDS, cancer, and multiple sclerosis “can’t get access to the medicines that you can here in the United States because that’s exactly what the socialist systems do.”
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 97-percent of citizens receive prompt radiation treatment within the one-month-benchmark established by the government.
Meanwhile, several studies ignored by Azar, show that tens of thousands of Americans die every year due to their lack of health insurance.
Despite spending thousands of dollars per capita more in healthcare expenditures than other countries with advanced economies, the US ranks at the bottom or near it in many basic health outcome indicators: life expectancy, available hospital beds, deaths from preventable diseases, and healthcare coverage rates.
To avoid listening to Azar’s ill-informed answer, Manchin could have posed his question about skyrocketing drug prices to a member of his own family. His daughter, Heather Bresch, is the CEO of Mylan–a drug company that earned itself bad publicity in 2016 after increasing the price of the life-saving allergy medication device EpiPen from $100 to $600.
At the time, Manchin made it a point to plead ignorance. “It’s so convoluted, I don’t understand,” he told Bloomberg News. “To get into something you don’t understand and your daughter being in this type of industry—it was best I stayed away.”
