A 59-year-old ER nurse in Vermont got breast cancer and was paying about $113 a month for her daily cancer pill. So her congressman put her and a few other patients in a van, rode up to Montreal with them, and walked them into a pharmacy where the same pill cost her about $10.
That congressman was Bernie Sanders, back in 1999. He was the first member of Congress to ever do that, and he was still doing it 20 years later with insulin patients.
This photo is from August 2022, 23 years after that van ride. Bernie's sitting in the shade on the Senate steps after losing 99-1 on an amendment to make Medicare pay what the VA pays for drugs, which by his math would've cut Medicare's prices about in half.
That 99-1 was pretty much baked in before he stood up. Democrats were passing the Inflation Reduction Act with exactly 50 votes and needed Manchin and Sinema to stay on board, so they spent that whole weekend voting down amendments, even ones a lot of them liked, because any one change could've blown up the deal. Technically his was a procedural vote to waive a budget rule, which made it even easier to kill.
Then that same afternoon the bill passed 51-50, and his vote was one of the 50. Inside it was something Medicare had been banned from doing since 2003, which is haggling with drug companies over price.
Those negotiated prices kicked in on January 1 of this year. There are ten drugs on the first list, including Eliquis and Xarelto, and their list prices dropped anywhere from 38% to 79%. Medicare figures it would've saved $6 billion on those ten if the prices had been in place in 2023. Ozempic and Wegovy are in the next round for 2027.
And the idea from that van ride is coming from the other side now too. Trump pushed "most favored nation" drug pricing in his first term and signed it as an executive order in May 2025. The White House says 26 drugmakers covering about 90% of the branded market have agreed to price drugs for Americans in line with the lowest that other rich countries pay. The contracts haven't been made public, so how much of that actually shows up at the pharmacy counter is still being fought over. But it's the Montreal math, pretty much exactly.
So that's who's sitting on those steps, a guy who'd just lost 99-1, waiting around to vote yes on a smaller version of the thing he started fighting for when he took a van full of cancer patients across the border.
Senator Bernie Sanders sitting alone on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. after his amendment to cut Medicare drug prices by 50% was defeated 99-1, 2022.
Nobody fails to grasp the fundamental rule of capitalism quite like its devout believers: that for capitalism to work, it needs socialism to compete against.
Officially Announcing Collab Characters From Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium and SSSS. Gridman
Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements for more details.
>> Download on mobile and PC: https://t.co/SiNltiPX6t
#GirlsFrontline2Exilium#gfl2exilium#Boomiversary