Politics & Power Quote by Michael K. Simpson

A politician’s scalpel: praise innovation, then sharpen the knife for a fight over who pays. Michael K. Simpson opens by genuflecting to “the great value and importance” of prescription drugs and affirming “pharmaceutical research and development” a preemptive strike against the standard attack line that price restraint equals anti-science. It’s not just throat-clearing; it’s coalition-building, signaling to industry and pro-innovation voters that he’s not coming for the lab coats.

Then the real payload lands: “our nation’s seniors cannot be asked to subsidize” the costs of “other wealthy industrialized nations.” The intent is to reframe U.S. drug pricing not as a domestic policy failure but as an international injustice. Seniors become the moral shield, a constituency nearly untouchable in American politics and the group most visibly squeezed by high out-of-pocket costs. “Cannot be asked” is canny language: it implies an unfair demand, as if someone has imposed a bill without consent.

The subtext is a familiar critique of global pharmaceutical markets: other rich countries negotiate or regulate prices, and U.S. consumers effectively pay more, allowing companies to recoup R&D and earn profits. By calling it “subsidize,” Simpson turns a complex system of price discrimination, patents, and public funding into a kitchen-table grievance with a villain: foreign freeloaders.

Context matters. This kind of rhetoric typically surfaces around Medicare prescription coverage debates and periodic flare-ups over importation, price negotiations, and “international reference pricing.” It’s economic nationalism dressed as elder advocacy: not “let’s cut prices,” but “stop letting them take advantage of us.”