Tom Steyer on Health Care

	Tom Steyer on Health Care Democratic Presidential Challenger; CEO

Break corporate stranglehold to get public option

Q [to BIDEN and STEYER]: You support a public option instead of Medicare-for-All?

V.P. Joe BIDEN: The proposal I lay out limits drug cost. It allows Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for the price. It sets a system whereby you cannot raise the price of a drug beyond the cost of medical inflation.

STEYER: Look, we've had this conversation so many times. Everybody on this stage believes that affordable health care is a right for every single American. And it makes no sense and the government has to step in. I do agree with Vice President Biden that we should move and develop the Affordable Care Act with a public option. But the real question is this: This is not a new problem. Why do we keep having this conversation? We have a broken government. It has been bought by corporations that include the drug companies, the insurance companies, and the private hospitals. How do we actually break the corporate stranglehold on our government so that we can get any of these things passed?

Source: 7th Democrat primary debate, on eve of Iowa caucus , Jan 14, 2020

Term limits will break stranglehold on low taxes for rich

We're spending way too much because corporations own the system and we're not negotiating against those corporations. And we've given tax cuts to the richest Americans and the biggest corporations for decades. That's all this is. We have corporations who are having their way with the American people and people are suffering. In order to break this, we're going to have to break the corporate stranglehold. That's why I'm for term limits. Source: 7th Democrat primary debate, on eve of Iowa caucus , Jan 14, 2020

Supports public option; allow private insurance

I have proposed providing a public option that uses the negotiating power of the government to dramatically lower costs, including for prescription drugs and premiums. With this option, we can provide quality medical care to millions more families and individuals while allowing Americans to keep their employer-based health care if they want to do so. A public option will expand coverage.

Rampant excesses of the pharmaceutical industry have put many life saving medications out of reach for America's patients. We must utilize the power of the federal government to negotiate lower prices for patients and break the corporate stranglehold that the pharmaceutical companies have on our health care system.

Source: USA Today on 2019 Democratic primary , Nov 7, 2019

More funding is needed for mental health care

More funding is needed for mental health care. There is a mental health crisis in America; among comparable countries, the U.S. has the highest rate of death from mental health and substance use disorders. As president, mental health would be included in my universal health care plan. The Right to Health, including mental health, would be a top priority for my administration. We would make certain there was adequate funding of at least current levels for mental health services. Source: USA Today on 2019 Democratic primary , Nov 7, 2019

Big Pharma charges Americans 10x what they charge abroad

Q: Truvada and similar prophylactic treatments are not a cure for AIDS. How do we deal with the ongoing high expense?

STEYER: We have a group of corporations led, really, by the drug companies who've bought our government. If you look at how we're being treated under law by those companies, it is somewhere between infuriating and scary. They charge us more than they charge any other people in the whole world, sometimes 10 times more for the same drugs. And in this case, they're actually working to preserve long-term extremely valuable monopolies for themselves. But it's much bigger than that. These companies are controlling what's going on in the government. They charge us what they want. We can't go to Canada to buy the same drug much cheaper. And in fact, the government is prevented legally from negotiating with them. What's going on here is we're going to have to break ultimately the power of these corporations to own our government and to control what happens to us.

Source: CNN LGBT Town Hall , Oct 10, 2019

Directly fund academic research to find cure for AIDS

Q: Pharmaceutical companies have no incentive for them to develop a cure because they continue to profit from people that have HIV for the rest of their lives. As president, how would you finance the science of developing a cure so that we can scale back the avarice of the pharmaceutical industry?

STEYER: The way that we can go after that is by directing science through universities, through research to solve the problem. So if you look at what Mr. Trump has done, he has cut research funding across the board in every one of his different budgets. I think that's the exact wrong thing to do. What we should be doing in a case like trying to come up with solutions to AIDS, with cures for AIDS, is going directly to the best scientists and funding them as much as necessary, as much as conceivably effective to make sure that we solve this problem.