General News Man buys rights to drug, raises price by 5000%, doesn't understand criticism

As if American health care wasn't fucked up enough already, now you got this asshole.

 

From a business perspective, I don't even know why he bothered to buy it. Even at that cost the turnover is low, it's only use now is treating Toxoplasmosis, which in the UK at least, there are only about 350 cases a year.

 

Well, severe cases. Toxoplasmosis is absurdly common and almost half of the population has it, but it's rarely an issue as it doesn't affect humans much.

 

He clearly does not understand how markets work. Yes, it is rarely prescribed, but that should warrant price discounts. If the supply remains constant, but demand is low, then those with a working brain should figure out that prices should go down....

 

Folks act like this doesn't happen anyway.

 

My biggest pet peeve with human kind, greed.

 

For the love of money is the root of all evil

 

1. How does he profit from that?
2. Why?
3. Is he a moron?
4. How did he even manage that?
5. That is fucked up

 

It gets better. Someone asked how he's able to sleep at night. To which he replies "you know, ambien"

 

My understanding is that buying the rights to drugs and raising the prices is how his entire business operates, and that he's done this many times. One or twice may not be profitable, but if you do it with a ton of drugs, it could be.

Real life has taught that supply and demand theory is far too oversimplified to accurately describe how markets work. Marketing, psychology, popular culture, and legal regulations all have a large effect on pricing, and people are usually as emotional as they are rational about purchasing choices.

 

Toxoplasmosis is most often found in places with poor sanitation; exactly the places with people who can't afford this price hike. Given the unfortunate link between poverty, unsanitary conditions and the presence of HIV/AIDS (immunocompromised people are generally the only people affected by toxoplasmosis), this is a horrid act of callousness.

Medicine should not be controlled by people who see it as little more than an addition to their portfolio of assets, who regard profit as more valuable than life, public health and medicine. Health and pharmaceuticals form industry whose essence can't be captured in a balance sheet, unlike his work as a hedge-fund manager.

The man is an immature bastard; his entire life revolves around wealth and the pathetic status given by other sleazy wealth-seekers from what I've seen. His done this before and I'm sure he'll do it again, unless there's global reform on the intellectual property status of all medical supplies. Current regulations don't go far enough.

 

If you think this is bad go watch Hank Green's video about how the price of his medicine, which he has to take twice a day for as long as he lives, jumped in price something like 10 times. The old company slightly tweaked the old recipe so that their patent wouldn't expire and raised the price from 50 up to 500 dollars.

Anyway, here's the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPf8vwnoEtU

The bottom line is that his actions are nothing new, most pharmaceutical companies are the epitome of what's wrong with capitalism today. They really deserve to be nationalized and all their assets transferred to universities and research institutions.

 

One of my pipe dreams to better humanity has always been to create a non-profit drug manufacturer in the United States wherein we would start out with a small portfolio of generic drugs and make them as cheap as possible without cutting any corners and then selling them at cost + normal profit and then take the profit to increase the portfolio of drugs we sold. Eventually, though, I'd like for the project to venture into brand drugs (patent protected) and buy the rights to new drugs and offer them as low as possible, perhaps charging higher during the initial patent protection phase (in order to amortize the hundreds of millions or billions it would cost to buy the drug) and then as soon as the drug sales paid for the cost of buying it, lower the price of the brand drug to cost + normal profit so that people could actually continue to get the brand drug at the cost of a generic once patent protection expired (while generics are supposed to be therapeutically equivalent to brand drugs, there are instances where the brand medication is medically necessary and/or has therapeutic differences).

One question (of many) would be what drugs to start off trying to tackle some of the drugs on the WHO list of essential medicines (Daraprim (Pyrimethamine) is on the list).

Of course, it would basically take a monumental amount of starting capital that would have to be raised through donations.

 

I'm a terrible person by saying this, but I hope something bad happens to this guy (like a terminal illness, or one that at least decreases the quality of his living drastically) and he's forced to shuck out hundreds, or thousands of dollars for his potentially life saving medication so he can see what it feels like to be someone he fucked over by being a greedy piece of shit.

Fuck this guy.