One in the long list of non sequiturs and incoherent thoughts presented in the State of the Union mess Tuesday night was this: "The next major priority for me, and for all of us, should be to lower the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs—and to protect patients with pre-existing conditions." Which is of course bunk. However, it's bunk that has potent political power, particularly against Trump, as Greg Sargent explains.
He's reviewed information from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted for Public Citizen from a series of focus groups he conducted in the industrial Midwest in December. One key element he found is that "working-class white voters who switched from Barack Obama to Trump are deeply angry about soaring prescription drug prices." Deeply angry, and in that is the key to forcing a rewrite of Trump's renegotiated NAFTA deal.
Greenberg and team found that these voters were livid about pharmaceutical companies and drug prices, with Greenberg telling Sargent that they "emerged as an extraordinary point of anger." In that anger is this nugget: "Pointing to the Big Pharma provision constitutes the 'single most powerful argument' against Trump's NAFTA rewrite." These voters are convinced that "'corporations bend the system to their will' with lobbyists and big campaign donations, 'so that they can earn more profits while hurting workers and consumers.' As one Macomb man put it: 'They are buying their laws, basically.'"
The results don't just give Democrats ammunition for forcing changes in Trump's NAFTA rewrite: They give Democrats another healthcare issue to shine a light on in 2020, and boosts their push to fight money in politics via H.R. 1.
