Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has been on a “Fight Oligarchy” tour around the U.S. aimed at disempowering the billionaire “broligarchy” that had front row seats at President Trump’s second inauguration, dropped an X post excoriating the favoritism the billionaires are lined up to receive in the new GOP budget.
The disastrous Republican reconciliation bill would cut Medicaid & the Affordable Care Act by $715 billion – throwing 13.7 million Americans off of Medicaid & the health insurance they currently have – in order to give a $1.2 trillion tax break to the top 1%. It must be defeated.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 12, 2025
Sanders asserted that what’s on the table — though details remain elusive about the specifics of the Republican reconciliation bill — would amount to “throwing 13.7 million Americans off of Medicaid & the health insurance they currently have – in order to give a $1.2 trillion tax break to the top 1%.”
But just hours before that, Sanders found common ground with the Republicans — and notably the President — on the rare issue that finds equal support among Americans of all political persuasions: the exorbitant cost of prescription drugs.
Responding to an Executive Order signed by President Trump aimed at lowering prescription prices for Americans, Sanders — Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) — wrote “I agree with President Trump: It is an outrage that the American people pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”
If Trump is serious about making real change rather than just issuing a press release, he will support legislation I will introduce to ensure we pay no more for prescription drugs than people in other major countries.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 12, 2025
If we come together, we can get it passed in a few weeks. pic.twitter.com/GtJC2aWSby
But Sanders also points out the performative nature of Trump’s Executive Order, which he says will be “thrown out by the courts” as “Trump well knows.”
Sanders used Trump’s Executive Order as a springboard to pitch his own solution to the inequity of drug pricing across developed nations, which is often characterized as a case Americans subsidizing lower prices for consumers around the world.
Sanders asked Trump and Republicans in Congress to support legislation to ensure “we pay no more for prescription drugs than people in other countries,” citing a need to rein in “extraordinarily greedy pharmaceutical companies” by making it illegal to charge Americans more. He also emphasized that the problem was not low prices in Europe, but high prices in the U.S.
Sanders here aligns also with another unusual bedfellow in billionaire financier Bill Ackman, a conservative who suggests that legislation similar to what Sanders touts as a widely agreed upon solution to the problem. “Ask any pharma CEO,” Ackman says.
The best way to reduce drug prices in the U.S. is to make it illegal for drug companies to sell the same drugs abroad for lower prices than they sell them for here.
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) March 8, 2024
This will force a globally negotiated price that will be lower than the prices that U.S. consumers pay now and…
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