Judge Says It's Perfectly Fine For Big Pharma To Screw Consumers

A federal appeals court has ruled that generic drug makers can ABSOLUTELY jack up the prices of their drugs, even if it is clear that they are price gouging consumers. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this.

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This is most BS federal judiciary ruling. It's just it's beyond understanding. They try to justify everything in this order on the Commerce Clause. They say here you got in Maryland, just doing exactly what Maryland should be doing, a state should have the right to say, "You know what? The feds, you blew it. We're not going to blow it here in our state, though. If the company price gouges, we're going to go after them." Now, why can't they do that with gasoline? A state can make a decision, "Hey, we know what price gouging is on gasoline, that hasn't been overruled by an appellate court. But we can't do with pharmaceutical industry." Because, you know the answer. What's the answer?

The answer is money. The big, big money. People don't even understand how powerful this pharmaceutical lobby is in DC. They're one of the biggest spenders in Washington, both in lobbying and in campaign donations. And so, in Maryland. Obviously-

Baltimore right over the bridge.

Right. And all they wanted to be able to do was sue generic drug manufacturers when they price gouge. This wasn't a law to rein in price gouging. It was just if you price gouge, I can take you to court, the AG can take you to court. And this judge, and we had just talked about how important judges are, nobody wants to care about it. This is what happens. He said, "No, no, no, you can't do it because the other states may set the prices and then it's crossing lines."

You follow the history on this judge, and we haven't done it here, I wish we had. You follow the history on these judges that made this decision. I promise you they're from silk stocking corporate defense firms that were appointed probably by the democrats, maybe the republicans thinking that, "Oh, once they're on the bench, they're going to grow a heart." Why does a person become a corporate defense lawyer to begin with? Why do they do that? How is it a person says, "You know, I had a really good day today. I won in court and I prevented 1,000 widows from recovering money from a product that killed their husband." That's a great day for a corporate defense firm and a corporate defense lawyer.

So, here you've got these types, these same types, making these decisions. Look, I got to tell you something. The Commerce Clause use of this is absurd. The argument that the Commerce Clause interferes with the ability of a state to make a decision like this, it's balanced against, we've said it before, health, safety and welfare. Typically, they're called police powers. And a state has the right to say, "In our state, I don't know about your state, but in our state the problems are so bad, they're so unique to Maryland. They're so unique in what we're seeing every day that we believe our police powers in order to protect the health safety and welfare of our citizens, we want to pass this." And this federal, this is way overreaching. Way overreaching by the Federal Court here.

Yeah. So, this judge gets to go home, the defense lawyer gets to go home and say, "Hey, guess what, honey? Today I made it harder for a poor family to afford an EpiPen for their child who could die if they don't have it. But you know these corporations give a lot of money to the people who appointed me, they're a lot of money to the people who paid me." That's what this is. This all comes back to the money. If you looked at just the law on this, there's no question that they should be able to sue when a company price gouges consumers, but it goes back to all of that money and politics today.

US Circuit Judge James Wynn, he dissented, thank goodness. He dissented in saying, "What are you talking about?" He made the same analysis that I just made. A state has police powers to say what's unique about our state, whatever reason they're coming to our state and they're gouging our consumers. I don't know what they're doing your state, but they're doing that to us. The state has right to take action.