He asked the candidates what they would do about the rising costs of prescription drugs. State Senator Steve Kelly suggested companies that develop profitable drugs based on government-funded research be required to return some of the profit to the government. Former U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug cited this week's announced merger between drug makers Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham as evidence that large monopolies are hurting working people. What is happening in the prescription drug industry is the same that's happening in agriculture, and banking, and energy, and transportation, and last week in telecommunications with the Time Warner-AOL merger announcement. Two of the big drug companies coming together.
Prices go up, service and product quality goes down and working people get the shaft.
We need to enforce our anti-trust laws to be sure that in the prescription drug industries, consumers do not get the short end of the stick. U of M physician Steven Miles has made universal health-care coverage the centerpiece of his campaign and he's traveling the state in a refurbished ambulance to draw attention to the issue. He says expensive drugs are often used to sustain people with long-term conditions. The problem is that medicine was designed as a hospital-care system when people where not faced with living with chronic disease. And so it's not simply a matter of adding prescription costs, but it's also adding community services, adding adaptive aides to enable people to live more successfully with the types of chronic diseases they now have.