(Las Vegas) Joe Biden, who has made lower drug prices one of his major projects, renewed Wednesday his attacks on large laboratories and their “exorbitant profits (made) at the expense of the American people”.
“I have no problem with companies making reasonable profits but, in the name of the Lord, not on the backs of working families and older people,” the US president said while traveling in Las Vegas.
The 80-year-old Democrat, who appears to have already campaigned for 2024, came to tout his record and plans for lowering drug prices, hoping to woo white voters elderly, who votes mostly on the right.
He recalled that on his initiative, the price of insulin was now capped at $35 per month for those over 65 enrolled in the Medicare public health insurance plan.
The US president has vowed to extend this cap to all diabetics, regardless of age, “including the 200,000 children who have type 1 diabetes and need insulin every day to survive. »
Joe Biden also again welcomed the recent decision of two manufacturers, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, to significantly lower the price of their insulin in the United States.
“Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any industrialized nation in the world. Tell me the medicine you need to take, I’ll take you to France and it will cost you a hell of a lot less,” he said.
Joe Biden said his budget proposal, presented last week and rich in social promises, “contained measures […] so that at the end of the month, there is something left for those who have toiled all their lives”.
The Democrat took the opportunity to criticize the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives and who will block his strongest budgetary measures, in particular those aimed at increasing the taxation of the richest.
Conservatives “have very different values,” he said.
Joe Biden notably accused the most radical Republicans of wanting to bury legislation called the “Affordable Care Act”, also nicknamed “Obamacare”, named after President Barack Obama who had negotiated it.
This text allows people who already have health problems to still be able to take out medical insurance.