CNN LGBT Town Hall: on Health Care

Amy Klobuchar: Take on Big Pharma, to make drugs more affordable

KLOBUCHAR: Make sure the HIV community can get the drugs they need. That means the PrEP drug and that means to take on pharmaceutical companies to make drugs more affordable. The second thing is to make sure we keep the protections of the Affordable Care Act. Make it easier for the generics to get online. Bring in less expensive drugs from other countries to start competition.

Amy Klobuchar: More mental health resources for LGBTQ

KLOBUCHAR: Second cause of death of teenagers right now is suicide, with the numbers for LGBTQ being higher. Get rid of the stigma by treating mental illness like any other disease. Making sure insurance companies are offering the insurance and coverage. More beds. And prevention lines, hot lines, all of those kinds of things. More counselors in the schools to work with LGBTQ youth.

Beto O`Rourke: Distribute PrEP to everyone, at reduced cost

Cory Booker: Forbid charging more for drugs in U.S. than elsewhere

BOOKER: We're going to use Medicaid, Medicare to negotiate down prices, taking patents away from companies that unjustly raise their prices, creating a law that you cannot raise the price of drugs higher in this country than you're selling in others.

Elizabeth Warren: AIDS drugs should be available at cost for all

WARREN: Yes. I want to see us bring down the cost of drugs that are generic. This drug will be off-patent by then. And I commit that in my administration we will let out a government contract to produce that drug and make that drug available at cost both here in the United States and all around the world.

Joe Biden: By 2021, ACA says insurance must pay for expensive HIV drugs

BIDEN: Under the Affordable Care Act, there is a provision that by 2021, it will be available to anyone who has insurance, and all will be eligible for insurance. It will be available and the insurance companies must pay for it.

Kamala Harris: Federal funding for PrEP to prevent HIV/AIDS

HARRIS: Gay black men are twice as likely to contract HIV and AIDS. One of the issues also that is relevant to this point is the affordability of medications such as PrEP, which is extremely expensive. I have been a leader in the US Senate to say that it should be covered by insurance and money should not be the barrier to access to PrEP, which is obviously a life-saving drug. In terms of HIV-AIDS rates among black men in particular, it is still much higher because the hierarchy still exists within the community around access to health care, housing, employment, and things of that nature. So I will, as president, I commit to you, deal with all of those, but also we need to deal with it in the context of having a commitment, which is my commitment, that within a generation we will end HIV-AIDS.

Pete Buttigieg: Good care for all and affordable prevention for all

BUTTIGIEG: I propose Medicare for all who want it. But whether you're on that public plan or on a private plan, we require that everyone be treated with equity. That includes not just treatments for HIV, things that can be done to prevent the transmission of HIV. It's why we need a prescription drug plan like the one I'm putting forward that caps the amount that anybody would have to pay.

Tom Steyer: Big Pharma charges Americans 10x what they charge abroad

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.

Tom Steyer: Directly fund academic research to find cure for AIDS

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.