Babs Lee: Cheap Medicine On Its Way

I.F. Stone once said that one of the joys of reading the Washington Post is that you’ll never know on what page you’ll find a front-page story. The San Francisco Chronicle continues that grand tradition with a story about Jesse Jackson and Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who showed up to a revival meeting at the Grand Lake Theater to talk about the federal prescription drug benefit. On page B6, Lee mentions that the new Democratic Congress will force the federal government to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices for pharmaceutical drugs. The Department of Veterans Affairs has done this for years and secured remarkably cheap medicine for its clients, but the Republican majority that passed the bill explicitly forbade the feds from using this strategy. It’s common sense, but it doesn’t exactly please Big Pharma. Now, that might change.