Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

According to a study conducted by Avik Roy and Gregg Girvan of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), Big Pharma’s abuse of the patent system around biologic drugs, such as Humira, cost American patients and taxpayers an additional $5 billion between 2015 and 2020. Without congressional action to hold brand name drug companies accountable, the report estimates this anti-competitive behavior around just this one class of drug will cost the American people another $25 billion by the end of the decade.

Intellectual property protections are the foundation for ongoing efforts to provide timely and essential Covid protection.

Next year, we will continue to ask the governor and legislators for small investments to ensure the public is protected adequately by troopers around Arizona.

The PRO Act currently has 47 cosponsors in the United States Senate. Arizonans should be proud that Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly are not among those 47.

It is now incumbent on Congress to stand up for utility ratepayers across the nation and say “no” to indirect tax hikes on our families and small businesses. I urge Arizona’s Senators to vote “no” on any unjust and unreasonable increase to the U.S. corporate tax rate.

Just how large a human footprint can the Southwest accommodate, and for how long? Rank-and-file Arizonans seem to have a better grasp of ecological and economic realities than their leaders. We should look to them for answers, and not to our reality-blind politicians.

While the previously outlined Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework may be a necessary step toward passing a major climate bill, it does not go far enough in addressing air pollution and the climate crisis.

The $2.2 trillion global industry of transnational crime – facilitated by illegal trade – brings with it a storm of negative implications for Arizona, and we must take swift action to do more to help shut these criminal enterprises down and bring black market profiteers to justice.

Stanford University scholars, for instance, linked testing data across the country and found only 28 general enrollment public schools nationwide where the students learned at a rate 50% or more above the national average. Arizona has 11 of those 28 schools, and charter schools make up nine of the 11.

The future of your right to organize depends entirely on you and your fellow Arizonans. The PRO Act is in danger of failing because of representatives like Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly, who have outright refused to support the bill.