Ezra Klein Vox Interview With Bernie Sanders 6/28/15
Ezra Klein
Tell me what it means to be a socialist.
Bernie Sanders
A democratic socialist. What it means is that one takes a hard look at countries around the world who have successful records in fighting and implementing programs for the middle class and working families.
When you do that, you automatically go to countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and other countries that have had labor governments or social democratic governments, and what you find is that in virtually all of those countries, health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost-effective than ours, college education is virtually free in all of those countries, people retire with better benefits, wages that people receive are often higher, distribution of wealth and income is much fairer, their public education systems are generally stronger than ours.
And by and large their governments tend to represent the needs of their middle class and working families rather than billionaires and campaign contributors. When I talk about being a democratic socialist, those are the countries that I am looking at, and those are the ideas that I think we can learn a lot from.
. . .
Ezra Klein
The argument people make about single-payer is that a tremendous amount of health-care innovation around the world is other countries freeloading on the amount of money Americans pay to induce innovation in the pharmaceutical sector, in the medical device sector. Do you worry that if we were successful in pushing down those prices, we would actually see a slowdown in health-care innovation?
Bernie Sanders
I don't. A lot of the money in health-care research goes into me-too drugs, copycat drugs where they will come up with another drug that really doesn't substantially increase the kinds of benefits that it has on the patient. In my view, the high cost of prescription drugs is a huge issue — it's an economic issue, it is a moral issue — and I very much reject what goes on in this country right now. Right now in America, uniquely among major countries, drug companies can double the prices for a drug tomorrow for no particular reason, just because they can make more money. We have seen that with name-brand drugs; now we're seeing it increasingly with generic drugs.
THE REST:
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation
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