Sen Sanders: Biden Hasn’t Been ‘Strong Enough’ to Keep Big Pharma from ‘Ripping Off’ Americans
Minimum wage, Social Security other matters for the president to be more forceful, lawmaker adds
President Biden has not done enough to protect American consumers from the high prices pharmaceutical companies are charging for medications, according to a progressive senator and two-time presidential hopeful.
"Look, you tell me and let the American people decide why in some cases we are paying 10 times more for prescription drugs as do the people of other nations. Why? And that has to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry, the fact that they have 1,700 paid lobbyists in Washington D.C.,” Sen Bernie Sanders said, directly to one-time Biden press secretary Jen Psaki. “Has the president been strong enough in telling the drug companies, ‘Sorry, stop ripping off the American people while you're enjoying record-breaking profits?’ No, he has not.”
Sanders, the Vermont independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, laid out other issues where Biden has not been as forceful as he should be.
“We need to raise the minimum wage, in my view, to at least $17 an hour, so that working people, low-income people, get a fair shake. Have we heard enough about that? No, we have not. We need, as I mentioned earlier, to make sure that not only do we protect Social Security from the cuts that Republicans wanted, we have to expand it,” Sanders said in an interview with Psaki, now an MSNBC host. “Half of the elderly people in this country have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. I have not heard the president talking about that as much as he should.”
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