SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email

Hillary Clinton told supporters that the pharmaceutical industry is afraid of her and that she intends to tackle skyrocketing drug prices, invoking indicted former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli as she campaigned Tuesday in New Hampshire.

“Right now if you hear the drug companies, [they] are already sort of stirring folks up about me—something they’ve done in the past and they will in the future, I’m sure,” said the Democratic presidential contender, who as first lady in the 1990s tried unsuccessfully to win passage of a health care overhaul.

Responding to a voter's question about high prescription drug costs at a town hall in Berlin, Clinton said, “I know that there are so many problems with the way drugs are being priced now and the cost is going up and it is no longer sustainable.”

Clinton, who has already laid out proposals calling for an end to tax credits for pharmaceutical advertising and ways to stimulate research spending, hinted she's also looking for ways to target investors who try to maximize returns, citing the Shkreli case.

“Some of you have heard about this pharmaceutical company where the guy’s now been indicted—Turing—right? Well what he did was go out and find a drug that people had to have to survive ... mostly for AIDS patients but not totally,” she said. “So he buys a company that is selling this drug and overnight increases the cost from $7.50 a pill to like $750 a pill and basically says, ‘Tough. I’m charging what I can charge.' We can't let that go on either.”

Turing raised the price of anti-parasitic drug Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 earlier this year, drawing widespread ire. Shkreli was indicted earlier this month for his alleged role in a multi-million dollar fraud scheme involving assets from publicly traded Retrophin Inc. “We can’t let the speculators buy drugs” with expired patents and “increase the cost like that,” Clinton told the crowd.

Clinton also made reference to the new drug that Gilead Sciences Inc. has developed to treat hepatitis C—at an enormous premium for patients in the U.S.

“Apparently hepatitis C is incredibly prevalent in Egypt. So the drug manufacturer made a deal to sell very, very cheaply in Egypt. Which is great,” Clinton said. “But the drug is so expensive that a lot of states can't afford it in Medicaid and a lot of private insurance companies can't afford it. So here we are once again a company came up with a great lifesaving curative drug that we had something to do with and they're willing to sell it at a really cheap price nearly anywhere else but here. We can't let that go on.”