Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Trump, black supporters meet
Clinton touts drug-cost plan to control ‘unjustified’ prices
PHILADELPHIA — Donald Trump was met with tears and gratitude as he sat with black supporters on Friday, including the mother of a slain young woman who was killed by a group that included men who had entered the U.S. illegally.
Hillary Clinton, acting on her pledge to curb what she has called outrageous drug costs, on Friday outlined a set of proposals to crack down on “unjustified” increases on prices for older treatments.
The plan released on the Democratic presidential candidate’s website adds to a year of attacks against pharmaceutical companies that have raised the prices of lifesaving treatments, including the outcry over Mylan’s EpiPen emergency allergy shot. Her measures would give the U.S. government a broader role in determining the correct price for some
drugs, a task that’s typically been off limits for federal regulators.
Trump’s back- to- back meetings, held in a ballroom in northwest Philadelphia came as he works to broaden his appeal among more moderate and minority-group voters in the race against Clinton while also working to maintain his popularity with his core GOP base by pressing his hard-line views on immigration.
At the invitation-only discussion, Trump met with a dozen business, civic and religious leaders who praised him for traveling to “the hood” as part of his outreach efforts. Trump was warmly received by the group, including Daphne Goggins, a Republican official, who wiped away tears as she introduced herself to Trump, saying she’s been a Republican most her life, but, “for the first time in my life, I feel like my vote is going to count.”
Renee Amoore, an area business leader, assured Trump that he has support in the black community, despite his low standing in public opinion surveys.
“People say, Mr. Trump, that you have no African-American support. We want you to know that you do,” she said, adding, “We appreciate you and what you’ve done, coming to the hood, as people call it. That’s a big deal.”
But Trump’s meeting also highlighted the challenges he faces making inroads with blacks and Hispanics. Protesters gathered in front of the building where Trump appeared, and a coalition of labor leaders met nearby to denounce Trump’s outreach to black voters as disingenuous and insulting.
Ryan Boyer of the Labor District Council said Trump “has no prescription to help inner-city America.”
“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,” said Boyer, speaking at the council’s headquarters. “He did nothing for African-Americans in 30 years of public life. We reject his notion that we have nothing to lose by supporting him.”
Next stop for Trump is Detroit today, where blacks make up some 83 percent of the population. He’s expected to visit a church with a predominantly black congregation while there.
In addition to planning trips to urban centers, Trump has revamped his campaign pitch to include a direct appeal to blacks and Hispanics, making the case that decades of Democratic policies have failed them. “You live in your poverty, your schools are no good,
you have no jobs,” he recently argued.
Black community leaders have dismissed Trump’s message — delivered largely in front of predominantly white rally audiences — as more intended to reassure undecided white voters that he’s not racially biased than actually to help minority-group communities. Public opinion surveys show Clinton polling far ahead of Trump with minority-group voters.
Trump also continued to take a hard- line stance on immigration, which he highlighted once again Friday. The New York businessman met with Shagla Hightower, whose daughter, Iofemi, was killed along with two friends in a 2007 attack in a Newark, N.J., schoolyard.
In an emotional exchange, Shalga Hightower said her daughter’s killers “should have never been here” and praised Trump for giving her daughter recognition. “I truly, truly thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she said.
Trump has been featuring at his events parents whose children have been killed by illegal aliens to try to underscore the risk they pose.
Hightower’s story is “a horrible story,” Trump said, “but it’s a story a lot of people are going through.” He added that Clinton “has no clue and doesn’t care.
‘FAIR COMPETITION’
Clinton’s drug plan calls for creation of a drug-pricing consumer response team that would include federal public health and competition officials, according to a statement released on her website. The group will monitor sharp price increases, potentially recommend penalties for unjustified increases and help make cheaper drugs available.
“It’s wrong when drug companies put profits ahead of patients, with unjustified price increases not for new innovations, but for long-available and generic treatments,” Clinton’s campaign said in the statement. “We need rules of the road so fair competition keeps them in check.”
Clinton’s proposals specifically target price increases on older drugs, such as EpiPen and Daraprim — the decades-old pill from Turing Pharmaceuticals that increased fiftyfold in cost — not the price tags on new treatments. While the plan doesn’t get into specifics, it would let the federal government determine how much drugs should cost, based in part on production cost and the value of the treatments to patients.
Once regulators determine that an old drug’s price has gone up too much, Clinton’s plan offers ways of pushing
back. The government could purchase the medicine directly, or allow importation from other countries where alternatives are sold at lower prices.
The Food and Drug Administration already can import drugs from other countries to address shortages in the U.S. For example, the agency did so in 2013 when quality issues caused a short supply of injectable nutrition drugs.
Clinton proposed fining drugmakers that push prices too high, or forcing them to pay higher rebates. The rebate proposal would build on an existing rule in Medicaid that can require manufacturers to lower costs for Medicaid, the government health program for the poor, when drug prices rise faster than the rate of inflation.
Neither Clinton nor her running mate, Tim Kaine, had campaign events scheduled Friday.
PUTIN WEIGHS IN
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin blasted both Trump’s and Clinton’s tactics on the campaign trail but refused to publicly take sides in a U.S. presidential race in which he’s been accused of secretly favoring the New York real estate mogul.
“They’re both using shock tactics, just each in their own way,” the Russian president said in an interview in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok. “I don’t think they are setting the best example,” he added.
Putin also said the hacking of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails and documents was a service to the public, but denied U.S. accusations that Russia’s government had anything to do with it.
“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?” Putin said in an interview Thursday. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”
Allegations of Kremlin interference have roiled the race in the wake of claims by U.S. officials that Russia was behind the hacking. The resulting release of internal party documents prompted several senior party officials to resign and shook the Clinton campaign over the summer. The FBI also is investigating cyberattacks on at least two state election boards that private security researchers suspect are linked to Russian criminal gangs.
“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it,” Putin said of the Democratic National Committee breach. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”
The FBI has high confidence that the government in Moscow was behind the theft at the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic Party organizations seeking to propel Clinton to victory over Trump in November, a person familiar with the findings has said.
An internal investigation by CrowdStrike Inc., a cybersecurity company, traced the break-in to two groups it says are linked to Russian intelligence services. One, Cozy Bear, it says is affiliated with the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, while the other, Fancy Bear, it says is tied to the Main Intelligence Directorate, a branch of the Defense Ministry.
James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Russia’s “track record” of state hacking goes back at least a decade, so Putin’s denials aren’t credible.
“Nice try, but no goal,” Lewis said.
Clinton’s campaign struck back at Putin’s assertions about the hacking and accused him of endorsing “foreign interference” in the election.
Clinton spokesman Jesse Lehrich said experts have concluded Russia was behind the hacking of committee emails and sought to draw a connection to Trump’s campaign.
“Unsurprisingly, Putin has joined Trump in cheering foreign interference in the U.S. election that is clearly designed to inflict political damage on Hillary Clinton and Democrats,” Lehrich said in an email. “This is a national security issue and every American deserves answers about potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and the Kremlin.”
Another world leader, former Israeli President Shimon Peres, said Friday that Trump’s idea of America is “unbelievable” and should be ignored.
“The idea of Mr. Trump, the idea of America,” Peres said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy. “Shall I say, in a nice way, it’s unbelievable, ignore it.”
“America is leading the world, the world will not lead itself,” said Peres, who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. “Walls will not separate people.”