Iowa Congresswoman says competition and generic drugs are the future for affordable healthcare

GOP Rep. and M.D. Mariannette Miller-Meeks discusses how Republicans can find ways to make medicine more affordable since healthcare will be a big issue for the midterms.

On Monday, Rep. Miller-Meeks along with three of her colleagues introduced a bill titled the "Biologics Competition Act," which seeks "to evaluate the process by which interchangeable biological products are approved to be used in pharmaceuticals."

"So in essence, what we're trying to get is biosimilar drugs that are the same chemically — that they have an equivalency to let those be prescribed as generic drugs, which would bring down the cost of medication," Rep. Miller-Meeks said on the Wednesday edition of the "Just the News, Not Noise" TV show. 

Miller-Meeks went on to criticize the Democrats' approach to healthcare, with a policy such as ObamaCare.

"The Democrats approach has been using Obamacare to go to a single payer Medicare for All system," Miller-Meeks explained. "But as you know, and your viewers know, Medicare for All is not the same program that we have now."

The Democrats want the government to control everything," the Iowa congresswoman later said. "They want an archaic, paternalistic, patriarchal system of the past where some bureaucrat is controlling your health care decisions."

Miller-Meeks' bill was put forward to speed up the approval process for less expensive drugs and to make healthcare more affordable. 

"Currently, the process by which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves generic drugs is different from that of biological products," her press release reads. "When a generic drug is approved it is assigned a Therapeutic Equivalence (TE) rating, but biological products are instead designated as "interchangeable" which creates uncertainty among pharmacists. Because interchangeable products are new to the industry, there have been very few reports done to examine the efficiency of their approval process."