More than twenty years ago, when I was the press secretary for then-congressman Bernie Sanders, I rode a bus with him and a group of seniors seeking lower-priced prescription drugs at Canadian pharmacies. The trips were part of our attempt to spotlight the pharmaceutical industry charging American consumers the world’s highest prices for medicine — and soon after, another candidate I worked for, Brian Schweitzer, started running similar bus trips. It became a national headline-grabbing crusade.

Sanders’s effort was wildly successful against the odds — until it was short-circuited by Bill Clinton. Despite well-funded opposition from the pharmaceutical lobby, the Vermont lawmaker’s campaign helped pass legislation through the Republican Congress that would have allowed Americans to import lower-priced prescription drugs from other industrialized countries — just as Europe has safely done to help reduce prices there.

However, Clinton’s Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala — with the support of the president — ended up doing a huge favor to drug companies by effectively vetoing the importation program, choosing not to implement it in the final weeks of the Clinton presidency. Shalala did so by parroting drug companies’ brazenly dishonest safety argument, which alleges that even as drug companies themselves regularly import medicine — and even though other countries have constructed safe parallel importation programs — importation would somehow endanger American consumers. She also claimed it wouldn’t save money.