Why is it any sort of goal to align drug prices so that they match per life saved?
Calling it a pricing error relies on the hidden premise I noted above - life-saving drugs should be priced alike (and if one can’t be brought down, the others should be raised to match).
And when he claims nobody will be denied the drug because of funds, why do you believe him?
And so what that ‘all the drug companies do it?’ If cops take a serial killer off the streets, should we not judge him harshly because there are dozens of serial killers still out there?
Was it being sold at a loss? If the company that was selling it beforehand was happy with the profits it was getting from it, how is it underpriced? Just because they COULD have charged more?
Yes, because they could have charged more. And, *should *have.
If you don’t agree with that, then you should also criticize the practices of the makers of Sovaldi for hepatitis C and the many, many more pharma houses that charge more per life saved than Shkreli’s.
I believe that is a metric used in the industry. Why should it not apply for Daraprim but is okay for the other manufacturer’s?
I am not saying that he is an altruist or a nice guy, I am just saying that what Shkreli is doing is no different than the rest of the industry.
“People” (and I use the term very loosely) like Shkrelli are the reason we have to have laws and regulations and watchdog agencies. He is the poster boy for everything wrong with absolute laissez faire and “invisible hand of the market” hoodoo.
Lives saved is one metric used by the drug companies.
Another is ‘overall health care costs’. As an example of that consider the (initial) exorbitant cost of drugs like Zantac or Prilosec, or even the statins I suppose. The total outlay by patients for the drugs was, and is, huge. But preventing one perforated ulcer or one heart attack offsets that. The problem is that a different ‘silo’ may see the saving (and a different payer may pay).
If Daraprim keeps people out of the hospital, similar savings are realized (and possibly even realized by the same payer, i.e. the health insurance company)
We keep hearing about how drug companies have to charge $$$$ to cover the cost of research.
But with pricing of Sovaldi, Daraprim and numerous other drugs, justification for the price seems to be “what the market will bear”, not any calculation based on how much it cost to develop the drug (and others in the pipeline) and make a fair profit.*
I can recognize that there are others in the industry whose sociopathy is not as obviously on display as Shkreli but are otherwise similar. Doesn’t mean I can’t wish the Shrek an extended stay in a prison where all the tennis courts are reserved for other people and the gluten-free diet selections are boring.**
Hey now, his lawyer says he was nervous and didn’t mean any disrespect.
*there was an article recently in the Wall St. Journal about the process of determining a price for Sovaldi, and it was based heavily on just this kind of assessment.
**the lawyer for the young woman arrested for complicity in the death of that 13-year-old in Virginia thinks she shouldn’t be in jail, for reasons including her supposed allergy to gluten-containing prison food.
By all indications Shkreli is lowlife scum. But I agree with his attitude to those congressional hearings.
All they are is a bunch of political phonies with very little understanding of - or concern for - the underlying issues hamming it up for the cameras to score political points.
The same goes for virtually all congressional hearings, BTW.
A lot of those other drugs, such as the ones you cite, are recently-developed drugs, where the manufacturer needs to recover the cost of development.
Well, duh. That’s what everyone else is doing. You’re the one coming in and defending it. Because it’s normal, that somehow makes it right?
The only difference here is that it’s 100% clear cut what was going on in the Shkrelli case. There’s no hedging behind development costs. The drug is absolutely cheap to make, and development costs have already been recovered long ago.
And there wasn’t a gradual increase that would indicate the market deciding it was worth more. Making a huge price hike is a horrible way to judge the market. Sure, you’ll get fewer customers, but how the fuck can you tell what lower price would work, so you can find the equilibrium where you’d make the most money?
It wasn’t even a good marketing decision. What happened not long afterwards? A competitor came in and priced the same drug (plus a stomach medicine) at $1 a pill, vastly undercutting everything. If the drug was underpriced by so much, why would a competitor be able to do that? They had the good will to price it into two digits, but they stuck with the old $1 price.
Because it never was significantly underpriced. It was just that Shkrelli thought he saw a money making opportunity. As he said publicly, he planned to milk the insurance companies, while giving it away for free to those who didn’t have insurance. And, to do that, he had to price it into the stratosphere.
That is, so he could make enough money to then spin off yet another company and buy up some other cheap drug and do the same thing. Basically, just a slightly less bad form of patent trolling.
But that only makes him stupider. Because if they don’t have a grasp on what’s going on, then they’re going to judge him by how he acts. I don’t care how contemptible you find the people who will judge your fate, it’s fucking stupid to let them know about it, even when they do know what they are doing.
It’s actually this sort of thing that makes me think he actually isa sociopath. He can’t even understand enough to fake the right emotions. Either his lawyer is similar stunted, or, more likely, Shkrelli’s massive superiority complex (narcissism) means he won’t listen.
Making your client look sympathetic is one of the most basic defense techniques.
The congresspeople are not the ones who are going to “judge [his] fate”.
They might pass some sort of law relating to drug pricing. Most likely they’ll be satisfied with their sanctimonious sound bites which they hope will get them on the news, and statements that they will publicize in newsletters to their constituants. Either way, it has no bearing on what happens to Shkreli.
If he does this in court, then you’d be able to make that point.
It will be years before the competitor’s formulation gains approval. In the meanwhile, Shkreli is gambling he can make a profit.
Where did I say it was right. I said it is hypocrisy to take him and his company to task for doing what every other pharmaceutical house does.
I think what you and others are saying is that, uniquely, drug companies should sacrifice their potential profits because ‘it’s the right thing to do’. Fine, tell that to the for-profit medical centres, private schools, builders, and every other profit-driven enterprise. And, I suppose, some will ‘do the right thing’. But some won’t. And so long as it’s legal why the hell should they? Why should some companies be expected to suffer potential loss (?opportunity costs) to satisfy your and my sense of what’s right?
I don’t think “hypocrisy” means what you think it means. It would be hypocrisy only if people approved of every other pharmaceutical house doing what Shkreli did; do you have any evidence that people in general approve of the practice and only disapprove with Shkreli’s doing it?
Because a for-profit model of medical care will contain horrible extortionate pricing in some cases. If you’ve got a gunshot wound and drag yourself into the hospital, what would be the market price for the surgeons to save your life? Well, everything you have, and more.
So should each lifesaving medical procedure cost the patient his entire net worth, on the theory that it’s better to be alive and broke than rich and dead?
The problem is that the patient typically has absolutely no bargaining power when they are faced with life-threatening medical problems, and just when they are at their most vulnerable are being billed by people who have vastly more experience in the field. It’s not like shopping for a vacuum cleaner where if you don’t like the prices at the store you can walk out and live with dirty carpets. Most of the time patients don’t have the expertise to determine what treatment they need, or whether the doctors or practitioners who treat them are giving them a good deal, or performing worthless procedures.
It absolutely requires oversight, because of this. A Laissez-faire system guarantees exploitation. We absolutely require strict oversight of the medical field in some fashion.
In the particular case of the particular drugs Mr. Shkreli was selling, the cost to produce the drug in question was extremely low. The drug would be available from overseas, but get this–the company Mr. Shkreli controlled was the only company legally allowed to sell the drug in the United States. Nobody could import the drug, because other companies didn’t have a government approval.
So he raises the cost of the drug to market value–market value to save your life, not the cost of the drug to produce. Which would be fine, except it turns out that since the drug is actually very cheap to produce other companies, run by people who value public relations–could step in and compete against Mr. Shkreli. Instead of $5000 per dose, they could sell it at about $1 a dose and either break even or only lose a little bit of money.
So it turns out that his scheme to price the drug market value per life saved was extremely foolish, since it didn’t work. It would be one thing if the drug were extraordinarily expensive to develop, or manufacture. But the drug was in public domain, it was cheap to manufacture, and in fact the only reason Shkreli had a monopoly on the drug was just that it was so cheap to make that no one bothered to compete with his company–back when the price was $10 a dose, that is.
But he raised the price to a point were it was very easy to compete with him. And I’m sure his Big Pharma competitors aren’t exactly happy with him, being the literal poster child for sociopathic business practices in the Pharmaceutical industry. So they’re happy to kneecap him by producing competing products at cost, to kill his business and get him out of the news. Of course, he’s actually going to go to jail because he’s a con artist who has scammed the other companies he worked for. If you were a shareholder at a company he controlled, how would you feel about his business acumen? Getting a good return on your investment? Or are you likely to have lost everything? If every company he’s touched is going bankrupt and he’s facing jail, that seems like he’s not exactly following Standard Operating Procedure, is it? Because it’s not SOP for corporate CEOs to face fraud indictments. Most sociopathic corporate CEOs manage to keep their money-making scams out of the newspapers and return value to their shareholders.
Are you going to try and tell me that the hostility shown towards Shkreli (starting the morning after the price hike was announced and having nothing to do with his subsequent criminal indictment) is even of the same order of magnitude as that shown to other pharma CEOs? Obviously the excoriation that he has been subjected to is without recent peer. From the get-go he has been attacked with a vigor and degree of animosity that has few if any parallels. And certainly nothing even close to what has been directed to ‘every other pharmaceutical house’. You may not call it hypocrisy, but I will.
Lemur866: I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. I guess I am really trying to say two things: If what he did (regarding the price hike) was legal, people should stop wasting their energy creating anti-Shkreli diatribes and should instead work to change the law - as you said, ‘oversight’ is required. That said, once such regulation is in place, we might then ask ourselves why statuatory oversight should be unique to medicine when compelling arguments can be made for the same type of legal oversight for dental care, schooling, housing and accommodation, etc.
Second, although what he did appears obvious in its immorality, similar economically-based medical and treatment decisions are being made all the time - decisions that have potentially life-shortening or quality-of-life-lowering effect are made thousands of time each day in your country yet, by and large, they are given a pass. How many times have you heard of people who couldn’t afford needed surgery or essential medications or assistive devices. Sure, there has been more and more of a cry to change the status quo in recent years, but my point remains - people are being denied needed treatments all the time strictly on financial/economic grounds. All Shkreli did was to be open and stupidly in-your-face about it.
So your argument is, as bup says, people should shut up about this guy because they didn’t raise the exact same sort of noise about each and every other incidence of a similar nature? Do you really need to be told (again) why your argument is both stupid and not an example of hypocrisy?
Apparently you DO need to be told again why your argument is both stupid and not an example of hypocrisy.
The fact that you keep harping on what you believe to be my improper use of the word ‘hypocrisy’ indicates to me that you’ve not got a more substantial argument. So use whatever word you want, but I think you know what I mean.
