A Wall Eyed Snot Nosed Hissy Fit
There is a very special place in hell for Martin Shkreli because he raised the price of a life saving drug from $13.50 to $750. a pill.
And although he is the son of Beelzebub, he’s not the real problem.
The real problem is that people like him can hold life saving drugs hostage from anyone who doesn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because freedom.
The problem is that health care should never have been subservient to capitalistic greed.
Don’t lecture me that the high prices of drugs pay for research. That doesn’t happen. The high prices of drugs get stored in Swiss bank accounts.
America is no longer the leader in drug research. I take six drugs for a progressive, fatal disease. (No pity allowed. I’m whipping its butt.) Of those 6 drugs, four were discovered in Europe. In fact, I was buying one of the drugs over the counter in Mexico for a full year before it was approved by the FDA here. It saved my life.
But here’s the part that makes Shkreli especially a turd.
Daraprim, known generically as pyrimethamine, is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasite infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems for babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy, and also for people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients.
That truly is a death panel. Where’s the Republican outrage?
Shkreli says he’s trying to improve the drug. Medical doctors say the drug doesn’t need improving. It works if people can get it.
That’s a hissy fit. Some little punk kid who screwed another company by siphoning off profits can letting people die because he can. We let him do that. We even encourage it.
Bernie Sanders is right. We must nationalize health care.
Right-wingers who don’t know jack about reality (but I repeat myself) keep saying that “America has the world’s greatest health care.” No, we just have the world’s most expensive health care. That’s part of why people in a number of other countries have longer average lifespans than we do. Here the $$$ controls your health care, not your doctor or your needs.
According to the WHO, we’re tied for #34 in life expectancy, along with Colombia, Nauru, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Qatar.
1Right on, JJ. Both my late husband and now my son were on scrips that kept getting more and more expensive. My son’s doctor is battling with the insurance company to try and get back the $$ on the scrips that were actually covered under their policy. Doc says this is not the first time he has has to do this. And that is a damn shame! I take one thyroid pill a day. When I first started and was able to get a “natural” version. Then that version suddenly was unavailable, supposedly due to demand. I am now on a synthetic and thank God for Medicare cuz I can get it for less than a meal at McDonald’s. I agree! Health care, including mental health, must be nationalized!
2And in the meantime, we need to get our drugs from Canada (over the counter if you are in Mexico, absolutely!).
I can’t emphasize enough the difference between the U.S. pharmaceutical industry ripoffs and what can be done through Canada.
https://www.canadadrugs.com/products/daraprim/25mg
Today in Canada it costs $1.67 per tablet or $149.97 for 90 tabs. Check it out for yourself. No shipping costs either, I might add.
3Not only that…getting drugs from Canadian Pharmacies (while still legal) has become nearly impossible. I used to get an expensive inhaler there (three months for the same price as 1 here in the states.) Wouldn’t you know the the US drug company changed the DOSING to what was different that before…and different that the Canadian pharmacy uses. No US doc would write the old RX for me. Gee….wonder how that happened???
4Rightwingers will not care for two reasons: First, the primary one, is that it is an effective AIDS drug — enough said; two, it is market economy. Do not agree but that is how they think. Callus bastards.
5Blue marble meds was one place we could get my daughter’s Rx
6And yet many of these drug companies are run by people who tout themselves as KKKristians. They are evil incarnate.
7Let’s go back a little. 1985. Full court press from NIH to discover what is causing this thing now called AIDS. Come to find out, France was working on that, too. The resultant findings that we know today as the HIV virus were released by France and the U.S. almost simultaneously. Today the credit for that discovery is shared by these two countries.
France spends about half of what we spend on healthcare. And all of its citizens are covered. We need to do better. They are.
8This is not “capitalism”. What these people are doing is just plain and simple greed.
Drug has been around, and been effective at a reasonable price, for 62 years.
Nothing to improve. Greed. Call it what it is.
9I hate the scum who do these kinds of things!
10Wonder what Hillary would say if asked. Too early for me to catch up on next year’s health care platform. Tired of voting for lesser evils, need someone to support. Bernie seems not to be much evil, at all
11He says they need to do really expensive research on a new version of the drug, but “If you cannot afford the drug we will give it away for free.”
So he screws the insurance companies, which hike their rates, so he can feel good about giving it away to a few peons.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/21/entrepreneur-defends-raise-price-daraprim-drug
12@Token Arkansan: “Cthulhu / Cheney: When You’re Tired of Voting for the Lesser Evil.”
13JJ said:
“The problem is that health care should never have been subservient to capitalistic greed.
Don’t lecture me that the high prices of drugs pay for research.”
That bullcarp about “the high prices of drugs pay for research” has been trotted out for many decades, there is almost always an ad on the tv hyping that angle.
Don’t ever believe it. It is pure bullsh!t!
Every penny of every drug companies’ R&D budget is expensed completely off of their balance sheets as a tax credit in one way or another. They do not ultimately ever pay a dime for that R&D cost. We do.
We taxpayers inevitably pay every penny of it in our (extra) taxes, not them.
Yes, we need a universal single payer healthcare system.
I’ve been saying and advocating that since the 1960/70’s (and I have always had excellent ‘Cadillac-class’ coverage).
Get well, Ms. B, we need you.
14A nice little addenda also in CNN
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/21/investing/hillary-clinton-biotech-price-gouging/index.html
Your question has been answered Token Arkansan.
15And this is why we, and everyone we can help to get registered, MUST VOTE! Vote out the people that want to keep us from affordable healthcare.
If the Govt. can price the meds we have access to, we might have a shot at more reasonable prices. BTW, how long till generics?
16Thanks JJ for adding that to your blog. This is nothing less than criminal. Just like the guys who bankrupted the economy in 2008 … but nary a one saw jail time.
There is something very, very wrong with the country I love & believe in.
17In some countries they put on trial jerks like that and execute them. While we reward the likes of Martin Shkreli with higher incomes.
18It is never enough for these schmucks………how much money does one need at the expense of those not in the 1%?
19Our daughter was diagnosed with MS in 2011 and, after some research, we decide to go with treating it with Copaxone. In my research at the time, especially reading online forums, I was able to learn what people had paid 5 years before (say 2006) — about $20,000 per year — and currently in 2011 — over $40,000 per year. What had happened? The market size had increased as the drug gained a track record, so shouldn’t the price go down? Fortunately, our insurance (via Maryland’s Health Insurance Plan) covered the drug, but, as evident from the forums, not everyone was/is so lucky. (MHIP has since gone away after the ACA took effect, because insurance companies could no longer deny policies to people with pre-existing conditions.)
20Sandy is correct.
21Single payor – public option.
With only one buyer those capitalist thieves will be chopping prices to get the sale. Linking all medical care to Medicare keeps the overhead down and puts all those ‘panels’, that make decisions improving the profit profile of their respective employers, out of work.
One irony is that a great deal of the research is done by the U.S. government with taxpayer money, then given to the companies for little or nothing.
22@22 LynnN:
Sometimes the US Govt. pays the bill, and sometimes private concerns pay (often both). But in the case here, when presumably the previous lower cost was enough to pay the bills, one might hope this increase in cost would fund new drugs/treatments. Who knows.
But, as I wondered above, how much longer till this medication is available to be produced by others as a generic. At least this drug works well.
23What I don’t get about the US approach to health care, is that during the long fight to get the ACA approved, I was constantly reading Repug scare stories about “Do we want NHS style socialist health?”.
As a South African now living in the UK, I can tell you emphatically that as far as the Brits are concerned, yes we emphatically do. There are problems and flaws, as with anything, but one of the few things that all our politicians agree on, it’s that the NHS is a national treasure, which absolutely needs to be protected.
Until the US accepts the simple principle that poor people also need and deserve reasonable health care (and loses its obsession with guns), I will have difficulty accepting that it really is truly free and democratic.
24Why don’t we have any laws against piracy? That’s what this is. And there are plenty of other arenas in our life where money lovers are making similar outrageous thefts, on dry land, and they should all be treated like criminals.
25If this slime trail sold weapons instead of medicine , he’d be condemned as a war profiteer.
As it is, we need to get a list if every drug he produces, and boycott every one possible, if there’s an alternative. Even at $750 a pop, he should go broke fast, if it’s all he’s selling.
Aren’t we glad that our “no-good, useless” government made the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines available to everyone, for free? Imagine the world if they hadn’t.
26Old Fart: That drug IS generic. It’s 62 years old. There’s a huge pushback on this issue and this isn’t the only drug with a “price increase.”
27http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html?_r=0
And the price of one drug has been “rescinded” but it is still doubled from the original.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/21/drug-prices-big-price-increase-for-daraprim-rescinded.html
The parasitic infection is known as greed and wingnuts all have it. Side effects are lack of compassion,ignorance and apathy.
28And in a follow up:
REPORT: Price-Gouging Pharma CEO Has Been Accused Of Hacking & Harassing Rival’s Family
September 22, 2015 Business, LGBT News
Yesterday we learned that pharma CEO Martin Shkreli has raised the price of a vital AIDS drug by 5500%. Folks have gone digging into Shkreli’s past and there’s quite a story there. US Uncut reports that Shkreli was recently accused of hacking the email account of a rival pharma executive and threatening his family. They write:
The report, taken by New Jersey’s Summit Police Department in December of 2013, describes a man named Tim Pierotti’s claims against Shkreli. It also indicates that Pierotti’s email accounts had been hacked by who he suspected was Shkreli. The hacker then used the email account to access Pierotti’s Facebook and Linked In accounts. Subsequent documents from Pierotti’s lawyers confirm that the IP address, 38.122.241.243 that was used to change his Facebook page were directly traced to Shkreli’s networks. As his accounts were breached, multiple postings appeared on his accounts relating to an on going civil litigation suit between him and Shkreli. Taking things even further, the report indicates that Shkreli friend requested Pierotti’s 16-year-old son from the account and began messaging him stating that his father had stolen money and betrayed Mr. Shkreli. The Pierotti family quickly blocked the account, but his wife continued to receive text messages from someone he believed to be Shkreli. Documents filed by Pierotti’s lawyers also claim that Shkreli sent messages to Pierotti’s wife stating things such as, “I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this.”
Just last month Shkreli was sued in federal court for shady dealings at his former company. Forbes reports:
In 2011, Martin Shkreli—then 29 years old and a rather outspoken manager of the hedge fund MSMB Capital Management—attracted some acclaim when he started his own biotech company, Retrophin, and began pursuing therapies for rare diseases. He served at the helm of Retrophin until last fall, when the company ousted him, later alleging that he improperly passed off legal settlements with MSMB investors as consulting agreements. Now Retrophin is taking the dispute with the controversial entrepreneur a step further. Retrophin filed a federal lawsuit against Shkreli on Monday in New York alleging that he created the biotech and took it public solely to provide stock to MSMB investors when the hedge fund became insolvent. The suit seeks more than $65 million in damages and a requirement that Shkreli disgorge all the compensation he received from Retrophin during the time he acted as a “faithless servant” to it, as the claim reads. Turing Pharmaceuticals, another biotech startup that Shkreli founded this past February, is not named in the suit.
Shkreli named his current company after famed gay computer genius Alan Turing, which only makes his latest actions more infuriating.
29Some might call it greed but it’s actually murder.
30Shkreli = sociopath
31Why isn’t a generic available?
32I’m re-watching the West Wing series and in one episode concerning healthcare Toby(White House communications director) states, “Don’t fall for their argument that they need to charge so much to cover their research. It might be true for the first pill, but not for the second.” And he adds everything that was stated above about government (our tax dollars) and private money, subsidies, loopholes and tax incentives.
33What a great series! We need to get Aaron Sorkin on the white House staff.
Another article on Martin Skreli (smarmy?) WARNING: Includes picture of the S#B!
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-martin-skreli-criticised-5000-price-hike-drug-daraprim-used-by-aids-patients-1520637
34I have been told I have MS. If it gets any worse, shit.
I can’t even think what people who can’t afford this drug are going through.
35Firm does not even have a lab. This is pure financial speculation. he is bringing the hedge fund lack of ethics to life and death matters in healthcare.
36Most drug-related research is done on university campuses. It is now not publish or perish but research or rot.
37No to mention the life-saving drugs the companies stop producing altogether because they don’t make enough money from them. Drugs that save lives of people with rare diseases. It is immoral and vile.
38Well, this guy’s meds do nothing for a case of the just plain evils…
I guess this guy’s motto should be:”Pay up or die”. Or was that the NRA?
39Drug developers scream and rant, “Drugs cost millions upon millions of dollars to create!”
Wrong.
The FIRST PILL costs a few thousands to a few millions of dollars [not millions upon millions] to create. The SECOND PILL and every one thereafter costs, on average, 1.5c to create. Sell one hundred million of the the most expensive pills [and they will] at 2.5c each and the company would break even on that one particular drug. And no company will ever sell a pill for 2.5 c. No one is even asking them to. So, if they sell their pills at, say, $5.00 each, they’ll break even 200 times faster.
Drug companies who DON’T gouge their customers make quite handsome profits – – or they wouldn’t be in the business in the first place.
Selling individual pills for hundreds of dollars apiece because they can isn’t about profit. It’s about power over other people. Folks like this make me very happy I believe in karma. The karmic clock turns slowly but it turns toward justice.
40Well, there has been enough of an uproar about the jump in the price of this pill, that Mr. Jerko is going to be lowering the price … he just doesn’t say yet by how much!! No matter what he lowers it to, he’ll still be making money off the backs of the people who need to take this drug!!
41I saw a clip of him discussing this before the announcement that he’d lower the price. Smug, arrogant, and condescending as you’d expect. He was explaining that the selling the drug for $13 was like selling a Bentley (Aston-Martin?) for the price of a bicycle. And that a full course of drug treatment would now be “only” $63,000, instead of $1,000.
This clueless, soulless pile of walking effluvium either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that $63K is about 1.5 times the average annual income for most Americans. Or that having a prestigious car is a luxury, while taking a drug to save your life is a necessity.
Total raging sociopath.
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