I want to rewind to something you said at the beginning. You very wisely said there are two issues on the table. One is getting prices down; the other is increasing the number of people who get drugs, increasing the coverage. Those are indeed two issues, but there is a question of sequencing that needs to be thought about.
We would all like the drugs to be cheaper. We would all like more people to be covered. We all agree it's a travesty that those realities evade us now. Instead of trying to attack the coverage problem first and the pricing second, I think you should do it the other way around, because any step you take to increase coverage, whether it is federally mandated or whether it is with a federal carrot in the form of the spending power, will meet with greater resistence when the prices are high. If you instead tackle the price reduction problem first, you effectively create a surplus of health dollars that already exist, because you've just saved money by reducing the prices, and that reduces the political friction about increasing coverage to more people.
In other words, if you bring the prices down first, you create some budget breathing room in which you can ask for more people to be covered.