The Senate health committee Sen. Bernie Sanders chairs recently held a hearing titled “When Health Care Becomes Wealth Care: How Corporate Greed Puts Patient Care and Health Workers at Risk.” The hearing came after recent news reports showcased how Big Pharma continues to unethically raise the cost of prescription drugs by egregious amounts, including by charging consumers roughly 20,000% more than the less than $5 it costs them to make the popular diabetes and weight loss drug Ozempic.

Right about now, you might be asking yourself, “Why is Charlie Kirk talking about Big Pharma?”

Because, after COVID, I’m convinced this one industry wields a dangerous and disproportionate amount of power in our country. I’m convinced it gets away with poisoning our population and does so by paying off the media, the agencies that are supposed to regulate them, and of course our politicians.

Sen. Sanders is right on one count — Big Pharma is the American people’s enemy, not its friend. Why, then, is he working to line its pockets behind the scenes?

Big Pharma is pushing Congress to use the power of the state to destroy pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), companies that employers voluntarily hire to negotiate Big Pharma’s rip-off pricing down.

Casey Mulligan, who chaired President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, found that PBMs — by calling out the drugmakers’ crooked pricing schemes  — save us $145 billion annually. Allow me to repeat that: PBMs save Americans $145 billion a year. That’s like one Ukraine proxy war a year in savings for average Americans.

Yet Sanders, Big Pharma’s knight in shining armor, has introduced a bill to take these good guys down for the drugmakers. 

“But wait a second,” you might also be thinking. “How on earth could Bernie be working for the drug companies when he seems to bash them publicly every three seconds?” And this is the trick I want to expose for you because it happens far too often in Washington.

You see, drugmakers spend mountains of money on progressive politicians’ political campaigns. From 2017 to 2022, they shelled out $400,000 to federal liberal candidates while shipping another $4 million out to the Democratic Governors Association, Democratic Attorney Generals Association, and other liberal 527 political committees. It also invests a ton of money in pet Democratic groups and projects, including unions, pro-illegal immigration groups, and Black Lives Matter.

Good leftists like Sanders never forget partisan generosity of this size and magnitude. He’s well aware of the pharmaceutical industry’s very deep pockets. Sen. Sanders might call the drug companies slimy, greedy corporations one day, but that simply gives him the air of credibility when he does their bidding the next. The drugmakers don’t mind empty rhetoric; they just want results.

Sen. Rand Paul, a medical doctor, can smell hypocrisy and cronyism a mile away. That is why he has fiercely opposed this Sanders-led effort to increase healthcare prices for Big Pharma. He wrote, “Instead of lowering drug prices, this bill likely will put more money in the pockets of the big pharma CEOs.” Rand Paul is one of the staunchest, most principled defenders of liberty in the country, and he is of course right. Unfortunately, Sen. Sanders has quite a few Democrat and establishment Republican supporters on his side.

Time will tell if Sen. Sanders and Big Pharma manage to succeed at ballooning our prescription costs yet again, but here’s hoping that the Sen. Rand Pauls of the world (especially his Kentucky colleague, Rep. James Comer, who heads the House Oversight Committee) can expose their dirty tricks and stop them before it’s too late. Big Pharma needs to be brought to heel, not further enriched at our expense. The last thing Congress needs is to give this corrupt industry another political giveaway.

Charlie Kirk is the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest-growing organization advocating for conservative principles on college and high school campuses. He’s also the host of the nationally syndicated radio show and podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show.