Politics & Power Quote by Michael K. Simpson

A neat bit of populist jujitsu: the “world market price” gets framed as the natural, fair baseline, while the U.S. price becomes an aberration so distorted it can only be explained by exploitation. Simpson’s line doesn’t bother litigating the complexities of pharmaceutical pricing; it assigns moral clarity by narrowing the cast. There are “American consumers” on one side and an unnamed system on the other, with “inflated” doing the prosecutorial work of implying gouging rather than cost recovery or innovation.

The specific intent is legislative and tactical. “Re-importation” (the ability to buy drugs sold more cheaply abroad and bring them back into the U.S.) is presented as a consumer-access remedy, not an anti-industry crusade. That matters: it signals he’s not rejecting markets, he’s trying to make them function like markets. The subtext is an indictment of American exceptionalism gone wrong: we’re exceptional not in outcomes, but in overpaying. “Only by Americans” is the sting. It suggests the U.S. is subsidizing the rest of the world’s lower prices, a grievance designed to travel well across party lines.

Contextually, this sits in the long-running fight over why identical medicines cost far more in the United States than in countries where governments negotiate, cap, or otherwise discipline prices. Simpson’s quote weaponizes that comparison to justify a policy workaround: if domestic rules won’t force bargaining power, import the bargaining power by letting consumers arbitrage the system. It’s a pitch built to make outrage sound like economics.