In the midst of a flurry of health-care-related questions during the second Democratic presidential debate, Joe Biden said something that was either a very strange slip of the tongue or a very bold appeal to voters’ populist rage.
“We can deal with the insurance companies by, No. 1, putting insurance executives in jail for the misleading advertising, what they’re doing on opioids, what they’re doing—paying doctors to prescribe,” the former vice president said in response to a question about whether he would cover undocumented immigrants.
Read: Whatever happened to pharmaceutical swag?
It’s true that there are currently many ongoing lawsuits against drug manufacturers for allegedly sparking the opioid epidemic. Putting pharma-company executives in jail is already a pretty radical—though some would say justified—step. From 1999 to 2017, almost 218,000 Americans died from a prescription-opioid overdose, and some pharma executives have been found guilty of bribing doctors.
But jailing insurance-company executives would be a strange move indeed. Health insurance covers a range of services, and while it technically also does cover opioid medications, insurers haven’t generally pressured doctors to prescribe more opioids, nor have they misleadingly marketed the drugs. That’s all pharma.