Common sense suggests that in a time of wringing blood from turnips, every member of the U.S. Congress would leap at the chance to save the nation billions of dollars.

Yet Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most commonsensical man on Capitol Hill, was the only member of the subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he chairs, to preside at a hearing on Tuesday to discuss an issue Sanders called "of monumental importance."

The issue is the current system for drug development in America, HIV drug development in particular, and how it leads to medications priced so high that the people who need them can't afford them.

Sanders pointed out that Americans are forced to pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world -- 85 percent higher than in Canada, and 150 percent higher than in France, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland.

He noted that one widely used HIV medication, Atripla, which combines three different drugs in one pill, costs $25,000 a year in the U.S. But an FDA-approved generic version of the same pill costs a mere $200 in the developing world.

Sanders has offered a bill, S. 1138, that would create a $3 billion fund to be awarded in prizes to drug companies for innovative new HIV drugs, instead of the long-term (usually 20-year) monopoly awarded under the current system.

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