8NEWS, JAKOB CORDES

In scenic Culpeper County, on the campus of a local community college, President Joe Biden and Representative Abigail Spanberger (D – Henrico) vowed to take action on high drug prices that have devastated many American families.

“Today, 1 in 4 Americans who need prescription drugs struggle to afford them,” Biden said.

Among their proposals are a cap on the price of insulin, empowering the federal government to negotiate better prices for drugs offered through medicare and medicaid and a steep tax on drug companies that increase prices after a drug is already on the market.

Biden highlighted the fact that Americans regularly pay much higher prices than the rest of the world for identical drugs – often even those sold by the same company.

“This is the United States of America, for god’s sake,” Biden said. “This is just wrong.”

Spanberger said that while many people in her district, which stretches from Culpeper to Nottoway, have suffered as a result of high drug prices, the issue is really national in scope.

“I hear about parents sitting at the dining room table and deciding whether they should drain their child’s education fund to help pay for their child’s medication,” she said.

The legislative priorities they outlined are almost all included in Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which Spanberger supported when it passed the House of Representatives last year. But the bill has been stalled in the senate, where conservative West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin has effectively stalled it.