You ever look back at the past and think "what if?" What if I did better school; what if I dated that one person rather than who I did; what if.. What if we elected Bernie Sanders to be our democratic presidential nominee? At least for that last example we do not need to say what if. Bernie is fighting as hard as ever despite losing the primary election. The fight against the drug companies in America is one of most respected things I have seen any political leader accomplish while I have lived. Not many people can say they dropped the stock of a company by 15% with a single tweet.

Ariad Pharmaceuticals has raised prices six different times on their leukemia drug over the past two years. The drug now cost a staggering 199,000 dollars a year. Almost 200,000 dollars for one drug. While they are experiencing a 78% surge over the course of this year hopes will be soon that falls dramatically. If you own a pharmaceutical company that makes life saving drugs your goal should not be profit. Unfortunately pharmaceutical companies are doing exactly that. Remember that recently a company who produces EpiPens raised their prices 400% in a single price hike. The price of that EpiPen went from 57 dollars to 500 hundred dollars overnight. Understand these are life saving devices for children with food allergies. Children. Pharmaceutical companies like Ariad, EpiPen, and anything owned by Martin Shkreli, who is infamous for raising the price of cancer drugs by 500 percent.

Kids, cancer patients, not a single one of them is considered a factor to big pharma when making drugs. They only wonder how much money can they make and how long can they get away with it. The real problem is the amount of lobbying big pharma spends every year. A total of 241 million dollars was spent in 2015 alone from big pharma lobbying to a total number of 329 clients. Big drug companies on average lobbied 725,000 dollars per client. Almost a million dollars each. One would think eventually it would make more sense to just spend that 241 million dollars on your on business directly. Maybe that way companies would not need to raise price so dramatically and screw over hundreds of people including themselves.

The only thing worse then the big pharma companies who raise prices on these life saving drugs are the people who are bought off that allow them to do so. People like former secretary Hillary Clinton who alone took 164,315 in the first six months of her presidential campaign despite a very tough public front against large pharmaceutical companies. No surprise Hillary has a private and public position as her emails alluded to it when leak of a speech gave to banks at a private fundraiser were released online.