Mr. Speaker, the pharmaceutical companies constitute the most profitable industry in this country. Yet, while their profits soar, millions of Americans cannot afford the prescription drugs they desperately need because of the outrageously high prices they are forced to pay. In fact, Americans pay, by far, the highest prices for prescription drugs than the people of any country on earth, and many of those drugs are manufactured right here in the United States. In this amendment, I want to focus on one small part of that problem, and that is that it is totally unacceptable for the taxpayers of this country to provide billions of dollars through the NIH in research money for the pharmaceutical industry, and get nothing in return in terms of lower prices for the products that they help to develop. The reality is that taxpayers provide substantial sums of money for prescription drug research and development and that have been developed through taxpayer funds.
Tamoxifen can mean the difference between life and death for a breast cancer patient.
And yet, despite the role that taxpayers played in developing this drug, the pharmaceutical industry is charging our citizens an extremely high price for this product. This is clearly unacceptable. In addition to Tamoxifen, Zovirax, which treats the herpes simplex virus, was developed using taxpayer funds. AZT, the primary AIDS treatment drug was screened by the National Cancer Institute. The popular blood pressure medication Capoten was developed using key NIH-funded research that targeted the enzyme that causes high blood pressure.