You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Senate Votes Down Amendment to Allow Sale of Cheaper Canadian Drugs

HeadlineJan 13, 2017

During Wednesday night’s Senate session, more than a dozen Democrats voted against an amendment that would have allowed pharmacists to import drugs from Canada—often at a fraction of the cost paid in the U.S. The amendment was proposed by Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sen. Bernie Sanders: “We are the only major country not to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. So you can walk into a drugstore today, and the price could be double or three times what you paid a year ago, and there is no law to stop them. They can and they will raise prices as high as the market will allow. And if people die as a result of that, not a problem for them. People get sick, not a problem for them.”

Among the 13 Democrats who voted against Sanders’s amendment was New Jersey’s Cory Booker, who earlier on Wednesday testified against Sen. Jeff Sessions’s nomination to become attorney general. Campaign filings show Sen. Booker received more than a quarter-million dollars in campaign funds from pharmaceutical companies between 2010 and 2016.

Topics:
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top