User Clip: Secretary Azar claims compulsory licensing is a “socialist” mechanism for “expropriation”

During his exchange with Senator Jones, Secretary Azar made the following statement: if pharmaceutical companies "pull out of Europe and Canada as a result, because there's no reference price to set it with, they'll lose the profit they make there and they will continue to jack up their price here, and so perversely we could pay more for the drug. And then the europeans could try to use tools like socialist compulsory licensing to actually expropriate the product and get the product even cheaper. So, oddly we could move to a world where they pay even less than they're currently paying with and we get stuck paying more for patient access.” close