Did you know Clinton has a plan to fight "drug price gouging?" Clinton to unveil details of her plan soon.

Hmmmm.... Wonder which type she's talking about though? Pharmacy or street? In all seriousness though, some drug companies really could stand to make their products slightly more affordable.

Price controls for drugs is a great idea provided you can know, with absolute certainty, that you won't ever get a disease that isn't treatable, if not curable, with current medicine. On average, only 1 out of every thousand compounds tested becomes a marketable drug. This takes an average of over 10 years and costs an average of $2.6 billion. Any proceeds from that drug must pay not only for itself but the research into the 999 other compounds that didn't make it. It must show a high profitability due to the high level of risk inherent in this field or investment will flee. Oh, and it has to do all of this within the lifetime of the patents.

There are things that can be done and chief amongst them would be for the US government to pressure other nations, especially the welfare states of Europe, to help bear the costs by fighting them when they try to strong arm drug companies into taking cut rates for their medicines which ends up passing a large part of the costs onto US consumers.

She is trying to distinguish herself from President Obama on this one. Despite the socialization of medicine to date, big pharma has been relatively unscathed in this administration. Smells like the beginning of let's make a deal....after I rattle a few cages.

Hillary Clinton unveils plan to lower prescription drug costs

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday will roll out a plan to rein in prescription drug costs by forcing pharmaceutical companies to reinvest their profits into research and allowing for more generic and imported drugs.

The proposal, which she’ll outline in a speech in Iowa later today, would also allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug costs and cap out-of-pocket expenses, according to details of the plan sent out by the campaign.

The plan seeks to address a key shortcoming of Obamacare, President Obama’s signature health law, as the Democratic front-runner aims to show how she would put her imprint on it.

On Monday, Clinton sent out a tweet referencing a New York Times article about a drug to treat a life-threatening parasitic infection that increased in price overnight from $13.50 to $750 per tablet.

Interestingly, I was reading an article on this very topic the other day. It isn't a new article by any stretch of the imagination, but I remember albuterol being much cheaper when I was a kid. So, I searched for some information about it and came across this article from the NY Times a couple of years ago.

Seems the issue may have been something as simple as a repatent causing the cost to go from about 15 dollars on average for an Albuterol inhaler (the primary drug for asthma) to upwards of $100, if not more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/the-soaring-cost-of-a-simple-breath.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0