H.R. 6505, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would (as the title suggests) allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices for its Part D drug benefit program. You've no doubt heard of studies suggesting that letting Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices wouldn't actually bring drug prices down, but if that's true, how does the Veterans Administration pay 40% less for drugs than Medicare does? It boggles the mind that folks could argue that allowing the buyer of almost one-third of prescription drugs in America to negotiate drug prices "will have little effect on drug pricing." Maybe if the Medicare negotiators are complete incompetents! But we can replace them if they're incompetent, because they work for our government, and therefore for us, but all big pharma corporations will ever do is push everyone around and steal your money. Hence both Public Citizen and Social Security Works help you tell your Congressfolk to help lower drug prices by passing the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop using private prisons to detain immigrants, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Again, letting private prison corporations house immigrant detainees is a way of putting a wedge between the American people and the government that presumably works for us -- oh, sure, governments always promise to oversee private corporations that take on government functions, but how has that worked out for us? When private prisons put immigrant children in jail, sexually and physically abuse them, and force them to take psychotropics, what does our government do? They say how horrible all that is, and then they do nothing about it, since private prisons are, after all, doing necessary work. But if we make our government house immigrant detainees, then we can more easily shine a light on, and get rid of, serial abusers. And as a bonus, we'll have far less corruption -- and the corruption we do encounter we can more easily punish, since it's our government.
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