This is one of those cases where I believe a government is actually useful. The problem is one of perverse incentive. Drug companies spend billions on FDA trials, development, and marketing of these drugs. It is very expensive to produce drugs, and so often times things that help a small portion of people (for example, some of the new insulin drugs) necessarily must be very expensive to recoup their cost of R&D. I dont think the democrats are going about this the correct way. If their goal is to reduce costs, providing government grants for drug research may be a better way to do it. We, the tax payers, benefit greatly from these companies developing novel solutions to hard to cure/hard to manage diseases. It is in everyone's best interest to keep prices down. Unfortunately, if we force the pharma companies to shoulder the costs - one of the downsides of laissez-faire capitalism in this market is the cost of these drugs must go higher. If we provided them grants, we could objectively say "we covered X% of your R&D, so this price is far too high". Without that though, we can't morally or ethically tell these companies that they can't charge exorbitant fees for these things. We could also do away with the concept of corporate lobbying in general and close the revolving door. This would stymie an incredible weakness in our current system. Yet another issue in the American healthcare system that needs addressing. The Republicans have kept their head in the sand on healthcare in general and it's starting to show. They will almost certainly block any legislation in the senate that seeks to compromise their ill gotten gains from pharma lobbying. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=K02++ We can see that neither party is innocent in the lobby money regard however. The Democrats have taken plenty of pharma money as well (the link above shows total lobby spend per party). Open Secrets is doing God's work. It's a shame more people aren't aware of this website.