Senator Byron Dorgan speaks on how his drug importation amendment was voted down

[Better Believe It]

'The Ed Show' for Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
From the transcript to the Wednesday show.

ED SCHULTZ, HOST:
SEN. BYRON DORGAN (D), NORTH DAKOTA

DORGAN: I guess so. I mean, there‘s apparently a lot of deal-making going on. I wasn‘t a part of it. And like an old senator once said, I‘m not for any deal I‘m not a part of.

I don‘t quite understand this. I mean, this wasn‘t just a deal. If a deal was made, this was a bad deal by which they stripped off a lot of friends who previously had supported this.

And I want to give you one example.

If you take Nexium for acid reflex, Nexium, you pay $400 for an equivalent amount in the United States, and you pay one-tenth of that in Germany, in Spain, in France. One-tenth.

So, we are so dramatically overcharged on prescription drugs. All I was trying to do was to say, pharma, big pharma, you‘ve got to reprise your drugs in this country.

SCHULTZ: Senator, there was a lot of talk last week that you had the votes, you had the 60 votes.

DORGAN: I did.

SCHULTZ: You did have them? What happened? Who worked against you?

Did Harry Reid work against you?

DORGAN: Well, seven days intervened, and in seven days, some deals were made that stripped off people that previously had supported it. You know, my dad used to say, never buy something from somebody who is out of breath. It was kind of a breathless quality around here about the deal-making that‘s been going on. And the fact is, a lot of it represents fundamentally bad deals in terms of the interest of the American people.

SCHULTZ: You know what amazes me? Is that the White House has been talking about bipartisanship. So here‘s a situation where they‘ve got Republicans on board. You had bipartisan support. And the Democrats bail on this because of this deal that they cut with the big pharma. And they want to know why their poll numbers are going down.

Can you comment on what‘s happening to the Democratic Party in the eyes of the public right now?

DORGAN: Well, look, this is sausage-making, as they say, and don‘t watch sausage or laws being made. This isn‘t pretty, but it takes not pretty to a whole new low when we can‘t—as Democrats, when we can‘t as a Congress decide that the American people shouldn‘t be charged the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

By the way, this year alone the pharmaceutical industry have raised the price of prescription drugs by nine percent this year alone. And we are charged 10 times, five times, double, triple the rate that everybody else in the world is paying for these drugs. And we can‘t, in health care reform, pass a piece of legislation saying stop it, knock it off, shut it down?

It makes no sense to me.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34464800/ns/msnbc_tv-the_ed_show/

[msongs]

1. the big O's drug peddler friends are more important than lower prices for us nt

[emilyg]

4. Always. Sickening.

[madfloridian]

2. That's awful. That deal will come back to haunt us.

Reommending.

[midnight]

3. kick and recommend.

[Garam_Masala]

5. Why lower drug prices? How can Big Pharma screw us then??

Doncha know Big Pharma contributed MILLIONS of $$$ to the people in power?
Like 50 thousand times more than DUer's contributed as a group?
You want all that money to go to waste? You want the corrupt politicians
to offend the hand that feeds them? :sarcasm: