PRIORITIES • Lower Cost of Living • Policy to

Lower Prescription Drug Costs

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

When did you last hear a politician say the words “Big Pharma” and actually mean it? For a while, both parties made noise about drug prices, won a couple of small things, and went quiet — because the drug industry funds both of them. I won’t go quiet. Bringing down what you pay for medicine is one of the fights I’m running to win, and I’ll say the thing almost no one in Washington will: the richest drug companies on earth are gouging you, and it’s long past time someone took them on.

I’ve seen what it does up close. My father lived in chronic pain, and the system’s answer was always more pills — he was put on opioids, and he became addicted to them, and it nearly cost us everything. And I remember the pharmacy counter: my dad asking if he could cut his pills in half to stretch them, or skip a refill because we couldn’t afford everything that month. No one should have to ration the medicine keeping them alive. Millions of Americans do it anyway, every month.

I’ve also spent years building businesses in healthcare, so I understand how this system actually works — and I promise you, gouging sick people is not how it has to work. Here’s how we bring these prices down.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Make generic drugs free — and let the cutting edge fund itself. Generics are the old, proven medicines that have been around long enough to lose their patents — the everyday drugs millions of people depend on. They cost almost nothing to make. I’ll fight to make them free for every American. And here’s why that doesn’t break the drug industry: the companies don’t make their fortune on generics anyway. They make it on the new and experimental drugs still under patent — and those stay profitable, which is exactly what funds the research for the next breakthrough. Free everyday medicine for you, a real return on genuine innovation for them. That’s a system that works for both.

Let Medicare negotiate the price of everything else. For the newer drugs that aren’t generic yet, we should do what every other wealthy country already does — and what any business would do for its biggest customer: negotiate. Medicare covers tens of millions of people, which is enormous buying power, and right now the law barely lets us use it. I’ll fight to let Medicare negotiate the price of the drugs seniors and families depend on, so a company can’t charge you triple for a pill it sells cheaper everywhere else.

End the price-gouging the monopolies depend on. The reason a drug stays sky-high long after it should is that companies game the patent system — tiny tweaks to block cheaper competition for years, and backroom deals that pay generic makers to stay off the shelf. They call it innovation. It’s a monopoly protecting its markup. I’ll fight to close those loopholes, so that when a fair patent ends, competition and lower prices can finally begin.

Pay for it by saving money, not spending it. This one largely pays for itself. Free generics are cheap to provide and keep people out of far costlier emergency care; negotiation saves the system billions; and closing the tax loopholes that let drug giants pay next to nothing covers the rest. We already pay more for medicine than anyone on earth. We don’t need more money — we need to stop overpaying.

What this means for Our District

I’ve talked with people all over this district who can’t afford the medicine they need — seniors splitting pills, parents choosing between a prescription and the grocery bill. And here’s why it never gets better: our own congressman has taken more than $400,000 from the drug industry over his career. You cannot fight to lower drug prices while you’re funded by the companies raising them. I don’t take a dollar of their money — no corporate PAC money, no special interest money, and no foreign money — so I’m free to do the one thing they’ve paid to prevent: actually take them on.

The bottom line

No one should have to ration medicine, go into debt, or go without to stay alive in the richest country on earth. We can reward the people who cure diseases and still refuse to let anyone be priced out of staying healthy — every other wealthy nation already does. Let’s take these companies on, bring the prices down, and put the days of splitting pills at the counter behind us. Together, we can build a country where the medicine that keeps you alive is one you can actually afford.

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