The New York Times recently ran an article about a 62-year-old pharmaceutical pill whose price has skyrocketed from $13.50 to nearly $750 after it was acquired by Turing Pharmaceuticals.
The increase in the price of Daraprim, a drug that “is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection,” will have a huge effect on patients. Doctors reacted with shock, forecasting, at best, treatment delays, if not worse.
Instead of relying on standard PR procedures, Martin Shkreli, Turing Pharmaceuticals’ founder and chief executive, took to Twitter, sending out 125+ tweets to the “haters” calling out his company’s operations, clearly showing that he couldn’t care a toss about the patients who can no longer get Daraprim. One tweeter told Shkreli: “You don’t care . But there are middle class people out there who will be in debt for decades just to pay”. To which Shrekeli replied “bp4Christ ain’t my fault”.
This is a man who started a foundation earlier this year under his own name, dedicated to helping underprivileged people! He now seems to believe that those rightly criticizing him are simply raging socialists and liberals. Actually they are simply disgusted. It is possble that some level of autism is at work here. One should sympathize with those afflicted, but should they be in charge of corporations?
(Edited: washpost.com and others)
The Washington Post reports that this incident is actually one of several gouging price increases. In 2012, doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center balked at the price of a then-new colorectal cancer drug called Zaltrap that would cost $11,000 a month. Writing in an op-ed in the New York Times, they argued that the new treatment is no better than an older one. In response, Sanofi cut the price in half.
Last year, Gilead Sciences was called to Congress to explain the $1,000-a-day or $84,000-a-course price tag for its hepatitis C medicine Sovaldi. At the time, PhRMA President John Castellani argued that the debate over drug pricing has gone “askew” and that research at development for such drugs comes at a high cost to companies. “Their lives, in short, will be transformed,” he said, according to Reuters. “The value to these patients, and to their loved ones and society — you can’t put a price tag on it.”
This summer, a group of prominent cystic fibrosis doctors and their patients were up in arms over the pricing of a drug called Orkambi, which Vertex Pharmaceuticals set at $259,000 per year wholesale. “It’s egregious,” California scientist Paul M. Quinton, who has cystic fibrosis, told the Boston Globe. “This is more than five times the annual salary of the average American family. How can they in good conscience charge that much?”
One of the things I like about George Bush was that he introduced the Medicare part D programme- against the wishes of many Republicans. This subsidises the cost of prescription drugs for the over 65s. However, the programme needs to be more comprehensive; no one should be in the position where they can’t afford the medicine they need. This needs to be accompanied by price controls so that the pharmaceutical companies don’t take advantage of the fact that in some instances, the government would be the single-payer.