Kamala Harris speaking yesterday at the Des Moines Register Iowa Presidential Candidate Forum [via Getty]

Who’s the tough­est on drug prices? A game of po­lit­i­cal one-up­man­ship is dri­ving the pol­i­cy de­bate in Wash­ing­ton

Ear­li­er this week we got a look at Sen­a­tor Ka­mala Har­ris’ po­si­tion on drug prices. She’s propos­ing that HHS take an av­er­age price from sin­gle-pay­er sys­tems like the UK, Ger­many and Cana­da — which lever­age mar­ket ac­cess for low­er prices — and use that to set the US price. Any­thing drug com­pa­nies col­lect above that would be taxed at a rate of 100%.

And the rhetoric is scathing:

While fam­i­lies strug­gle to make it to the end of the month, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies are turn­ing record prof­its. They’re spend­ing near­ly as much on ad­ver­tis­ing as R&D. They’re ma­nip­u­lat­ing their mar­ket pow­er to hike prices on life­sav­ing gener­ic drugs. They’re mak­ing twice the prof­it of the av­er­age in­dus­try in Amer­i­ca and still in­creased drug prices by 10.5% over the past six months alone. Mean­while, they are charg­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly high­er prices to Amer­i­can con­sumers.

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