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Should the federal government be in the business of manufacturing generic drugs? Elizabeth Warren thinks so

Pharmaceutical companies send "detailers" to hospitals to persuade doctors to prescribe their medications.
Prescribed medications.
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Listen 24:44
Should the federal government be in the business of manufacturing generic drugs? Elizabeth Warren thinks so

Potential presidential hopeful and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill today to bring drug prices down by allowing the federal government to become a manufacturer of some generic drugs.

The plan is detailed in an op-ed penned by the progressive lawmaker published in the Washington Post.

Warren’s bill would establish an agency within the federal government that would be mandated to make at least 15 different generic drugs.

The bill faces a difficult chance of passage in the Republican-led Senate.

Guests:

Kavita Patel, M.D., nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; she’s also a practicing primary care physician at Johns Hopkins Medicine; she tweets

Avik Roy, president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a non-profit think tank; the policy editor at Forbes and former policy advisor to Marco Rubio, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney