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Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Senator Wyden.
Mr. President, when I talk to Vermonters, as I am sure when you talk to Tennesseeans, everyday, hard-working people at the end of the month are struggling to pay their bills. It is expensive.
And people are working really hard, but the cost of things is going up. Taxes are eating into their paychecks, and they don't understand how it is they can work so hard--many families, it is two people working--and they still can't pay their bills.
There is a suspicion among a lot of folks I talk to that there is something wrong, and it is kind of a rigged situation. What we are talking about today proves that the suspicion that Vermonters have about things being rigged, they are right.
The second point I want to make at the outset is this issue, this specific example, provides such clarity that some of the worst things that cause the most suffering and the most economic insecurity are totally legal--totally wrong, by the way, but legal.
What did we find out with the Wyden report? We found that a major U.S. pharmaceutical company was able to make sales of $20 billion of its product in 2019 and report zero income--zero in profits here in this country.
What that ultimately means is that what Pfizer paid for taxes-- despite this extraordinary profit, they paid less than the mailroom clerk pays in Social Security. They paid less than the pharmacist at the drugstore who dispenses the prescriptions. They paid less than the delivery drivers who may have brought these prescriptions to a person's home. They paid less than the employees of Pfizer, whether it was a lab technician or a clerk or anyone at that company.
So Vermonters asked me: Wait a minute. How is this $20 billion in sales, extraordinarily profitable company--yet under the legal use of the Tax Code, they are able to report zero? Well, this is where, as much as I condemn Pfizer for manipulating and taking advantage of these legal loopholes, I say the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress bears enormous responsibility for allowing this legal loophole to be used.
Pfizer and every profitable company should pay their fair share of taxes. That is all we are talking about. So when Vermonters, at the end of the month, are trying to look at how they are going to pay their bills if their checkbook balance won't cover it, and they think the system is rigged, they are right.
One of the ways for us to unrig it is to attack this legal use of the Tax Code that was passed by this Congress.
Now, this is worse than just the Tax Code because other provisions have made Pfizer so profitable courtesy of the taxpayer. One of their major drugs, Eliquis, $791 million of taxpayer money was used in the research and development of it. Pfizer has that, been immensely profitable, and by the way, it is a good drug. It helps with strokes, but it is a wicked price.
So here in the United States, if you are buying that drug, that costs $7,100. In Canada, it is 900 bucks. In Japan, it is $940; the United Kingdom, $760; in France, $650.
So Vermonters ask me: Wait a minute. Our taxpayer dollars went into helping Pfizer develop that drug, $791 million, and we have to pay six, seven, eight times here in the United States than Pfizer sells it in other countries that are our peers? They think that is wrong, and so do I.
Then you think about the protection that this Congress gives to intellectual property, and rightly so, where that pricing power that goes along with getting a patent is so abused in this country that it inflicts enormous economic hardship on individuals who have to buy it directly, on taxpayers who fund it through Medicare and Medicaid, and on our employers who really care about their employees and they want to provide employer-sponsored healthcare, but those premiums keep going up and up and up because of the pharma prices, and it means the raises are flat. That is not right.
Then you have the fact that for pharma, we have created, as we should, publicly financed healthcare--Medicare, Medicaid--and employer- sponsored. So you have a situation for the pharmaceutical industry, and we are talking specifically now about Pfizer, where they get a guaranteed market: Medicare, Medicaid, employer-sponsored. They get a patent and then abuse the pricing power that goes along with it and stick it to Americans, despite the fact that American taxpayers funded so much of the basic research that went into developing this product they put out on the market. Then they end up with a tax code, courtesy of the U.S. Congress, that allows them to do what no corner drugstore could ever do; basically say that the sales they made weren't really made at the corner in Burlington, VT, they were made at the corner in Singapore.
Oh, and by the way, Pfizer worked out a deal with Singapore to get preferential tax treatment. And when they were asked, What was that agreement, they had a nondisclosure agreement with Singapore to conceal from legitimate investigation about their tax liability, what that deal was.
So this is really shocking. But if any of us wonder why everyday folks who are showing up to do their job in all of their places of employment in your State and mine and then at the end of the month, despite all their hard work, are having trouble paying their utility bill and they just wonder, Is this system rigged, they are right. Exhibit A is what has been exposed in this report by the Senate Finance Committee and Senator Wyden.
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