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The pharma industry is one of the few industries that comes up every year and brags about how much worse they got - like, now it costs $2 billion to make a drug, and it was a billion 5 years ago.

I don't want to suggest that controlling pharmaceutical costs is the answer to what ails the U.S. health care system. It isn't.

The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.

The United States is the only advanced country that permits the pharmaceutical industry to charge exactly what the market will bear, whatever it wants.

Since the pharmaceuticals don't make any money and they control the doctors. If the doctors don't make any money then all hell breaks loose. In communities like LA and New York they are using a lot of the youth for a test sight.

It is very clear that the present system of innovation for medicines is very inefficient and really somewhat corrupt. It benefits shareholders over patients; it produces for the rich markets and not for the poor and does not produce for minority diseases.

First of all, pharmaceutical costs are the single fastest-growing part of our health care budget.

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

Imports create competition and keep domestic industry more responsive to consumers. In the United States, we import everything consumers want. So why not pharmaceuticals?

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we'd think it's a pretty serious problem. In fact, we'd probably go to war.