I know capitalism works...but

[Kraken]

It's almost as if profit motive and public health needs are at cross purposes.

Remove competition and the profit motive breaks stuff. That's what happening here. With healthy competition, pharma can turn a profit AND serve the public good.

Where is there healthy competition, outside of generic drugs? Even in cases where multiple companies make patented drugs to treat the same illnesses, prices differ depending on whether you're a pharmacy, an insured individual, an uninsured individual, a hospital, an insurer, a government...all of them negotiate pricing based on their market clout. Only Medicare, the largest market of all, is forbidden from negotiating prices. If competition enters into it at all, it's a footnote.

One of Trump's more sensible-sounding proposals would require drug companies to display the price of their drugs in their advertisements. AFAIK that idea died aborning; what benchmark do you publish when almost nobody actually pays it?

[Pyperkub]

It's almost as if profit motive and public health needs are at cross purposes.

Remove competition and the profit motive breaks stuff. That's what happening here. With healthy competition, pharma can turn a profit AND serve the public good.

Unfettered capitalism tends towards monopoly, and the best way we've found to keep market forces active in research is limited monopolies on IP, including drugs.

Research/Patent/Testing processes have too high of an upfront cost to be profitable with competition, hence competitive markets aren't present/functional in large swaths of the Drug sphere. Look at the antibiotics market:

In 2018 alone, three large legacy pharma firms closed their antibiotic research programs. So the collapse of even a small business that stepped up to make a new antibiotic is a blow.

Achaogen hit all the marks that should have signaled success. It recruited experienced developers, targeted an infection that the World Health Organization considers a critical unmet need, stuck with its compound through 15 years of testing, scored several rounds of public investment and private philanthropy, and got its drug approved. Yet the market didn’t reward the company for producing a new antibiotic: on the day the FDA announced its decision, its stock price actually dropped by 20 percent. Almost a year later, it has earned less than $1 million on the drug, not enough to stay alive...

...The larger story of the Achaogen bankruptcy is that the financial structures that sustained antibiotic development for decades are broken. If we want new antibiotics, we’re going to have to find new ways to pay for them. And that will involve hard choices with big dollar signs attached.

Successful drug development relies on an extremely simple assumption. If you spend the industry-standard amounts of time and money to achieve a new drug—generally accepted to be 10 to 15 years and at least $1 billion—you will end up with a product to which you can assign a high enough price, or sell in enough volume, to earn back that R&D budget, reward investors, and turn a profit.

That math works for most of the products of the pharmaceutical industry, from old drugs that people take every day—antidepressants, beta-blockers, statins—to the newest cancer therapies known as CAR-T, which can cost almost $500,000 per dose. But antibiotics don’t fit that equation. Unlike cancer drugs, most antibiotics are inexpensive; the few with high price tags are reserved for rare hospital use. And unlike drugs to treat chronic diseases, people take antibiotics for only short periods of time.

[LawBeefaroni]

It's almost as if profit motive and public health needs are at cross purposes.

Remove competition and the profit motive breaks stuff. That's what happening here. With healthy competition, pharma can turn a profit AND serve the public good.

Where is there healthy competition, outside of generic drugs?

That's my point. There is no real competition, thanks to pharma making laws for us, and that's why it's broken.

One of Trump's more sensible-sounding proposals would require drug companies to display the price of their drugs in their advertisements. AFAIK that idea died aborning; what benchmark do you publish when almost nobody actually pays it?

There are industry standards like ASP and AWP. It's possible but you couldn't rely on manufacturers reporting it.

[stessier]

If these allegations are true, a bunch of people are going to jail.

Twenty leading drug companies—including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Novartis, and Mylan—were in cahoots for years to fix and dramatically inflate the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, in some cases to raising prices "well over 1,000 percent," according to a lawsuit filed late last week by 44 states.

The alleged scheme was intended to ensure that each company was a "responsible competitor" who was "playing nice in the sandbox" to get its "fair share" of profits from the drugs. Those drugs included pills, capsules, ointments, and cream. They range from oral antibiotics, blood thinners, cancer drugs, contraceptives, statins, anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-depressants, blood pressure medications, drugs used to treat HIV, and drugs for ADHD. A full list of the generic drugs can be found here.

We have corporate training about avoiding these type of situations. I mean, this is textbook wrong doing. What were they thinking?

[Isgrimnur]

But mah Laissez-faire!

[LawBeefaroni]

I doubt anyone goes to jail. Big fines and judgements against the drug companies, but they'll pale in comparison to how much they made off of price fixing.

[Isgrimnur]

Last week, Marathon Pharmaceuticals announced that it would start selling an old steroid drug that treats Duchenne muscular dystrophy for a whopping $89,000 per year of treatment. That’s a steep increase from the $1,200-per-year generic version that families could import from other countries.

Shelved now due to the uproar but no doubt it will resume after it wears off.

CNBC

U.S. health regulators approved a second drug for a debilitating form of muscular dystrophy, a surprise decision after the medication was rejected for safety concerns just four months ago.
...
The FDA said late Thursday it approved Sarepta Therapeutics’ Vyondys 53 for patients with a form of Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. Duchenne’s affects about 1 in every 3,600 boys in the U.S., causing muscle weakness, loss of movement and early death, usually when patients are in their 20s or 30s. The drug is for a specific type that affects about 8 percent of boys with Duchenne’s.

In August, the FDA appeared to reject the injectable medication, sending a letter to the company flagging risks of infections and kidney injury. But Sarepta disputed the decision, raising it to FDA’s drug center leadership. The company resubmitted its application and data, and the FDA reversed its decision, according to a Sarepta press release.
...
Vyondys received “accelerated approval” based on preliminary results showing it boosts a protein that aids the growth of muscle fibers. But the drug has not yet been shown to improve patients’ mobility or health. The FDA is requiring Sarepta to conduct follow-up studies on those measures for both drugs. If the company fails to show the drugs help patients, the FDA can withdraw approval — though it rarely does so.

The follow-up study for Vyondys is due by 2024. The drug will cost $300,000 per year for the typical patient — a child weighing 44 pounds, the company said. That’s the same price as Sarepta’s earlier drug.

[hitbyambulance]

i noted on here some years ago the cost of levothyroxine went up very suddenly, corresponding with the timing of this price-fixing. it was very obvious at the time when it happened, so it's frustrating this took so long for legal action to be taken.

[Jeff V]

i noted on here some years ago the cost of levothyroxine went up very suddenly, corresponding with the timing of this price-fixing. it was very obvious at the time when it happened, so it's frustrating this took so long for legal action to be taken.

Oddly I've been getting brand name Synthroid lately. My pharmacy had been giving me generic levothyroxine since Synthroid was bitch slapped with a class action suit years ago (I think I got $75 of that one...my nephew, who has been on it his entire life, about $300).

[Isgrimnur]

MarketWatch

CVS Health Corp. said Tuesday that it will acquire 110 Schnuck Markets Inc. pharmacies across the Midwest. ... Schnucks has 13,500 employees. CVS says it will post all pharmacist and pharmacy technician jobs and Schnuck employees can apply for them.

[malchior]

He's spent the last 6 months in a federal holding facility in Brooklyn which sounds unpleasant. Not sure of where he's going to serve the rest of the term.

Sounds like he ended up in NJ then moved to PA. according to this article about a reporter at Bloomberg that fell for him, divorced her husband, resigned from Bloomberg ahead of being fired, declared her love for him, and was cut off by him when he heard this article was being written.

lmost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar. Smythe, who covered white-collar crime for Bloomberg News, wore mostly black and gray, and usually skipped makeup. She and her husband, who worked in finance, spent their free time cooking, walking Smythe’s rescue dog, and going on literary pub crawls. “We had the perfect little Brooklyn life,” Smythe says.

Then she chucked it all.

Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she not only covered, but broke the news of his arrest. It was a scoop that ignited the Internet, because her love interest, now life partner, is not just any defendant, but Martin Shkreli: the so-called “Pharma Bro” and online provocateur, who increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight and made headlines for buying a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $2 million. Shkreli, convicted of fraud in 2017, is now serving seven years in prison.

“I fell down the rabbit hole,” Smythe tells me, sitting in her bright basement apartment in Harlem, speaking publicly about her romance with Shkreli for the first time. The relationship has made her completely rethink her earlier work covering the courts, and as she looks back on all of the little decisions she made that caused this giant break in her life, she says she has no regrets: “I’m happy here. I feel like I have purpose.”

[Holman]

He's spent the last 6 months in a federal holding facility in Brooklyn which sounds unpleasant. Not sure of where he's going to serve the rest of the term.

Sounds like he ended up in NJ then moved to PA. according to this article about a reporter at Bloomberg that fell for him, divorced her husband, resigned from Bloomberg ahead of being fired, declared her love for him, and was cut off by him when he heard this article was being written.

And now she's apparently trying to shop the movie rights to her story.

[malchior]

He's spent the last 6 months in a federal holding facility in Brooklyn which sounds unpleasant. Not sure of where he's going to serve the rest of the term.

Sounds like he ended up in NJ then moved to PA. according to this article about a reporter at Bloomberg that fell for him, divorced her husband, resigned from Bloomberg ahead of being fired, declared her love for him, and was cut off by him when he heard this article was being written.

And now she's apparently trying to shop the movie rights to her story.

Good luck to her. It is lifetime level movie material at best.

[Jaddison]

I am betting he cut her off after the fiance angle to being released early didn't work. She had her part in his narcissistic world and it was over once she was of no more use.

[Isgrimnur]

Guardian

Martin Shkreli ... has been released from prison.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said he had been released to a halfway house.
...
Shkreli is expected to be released from community confinement on 14 September 2022. He was originally due to be released from prison in September 2023.
...
Earlier this year, the 39-year old was barred for life from the pharmaceutical industry and fined $64.6m by a US court after the Federal Trade Commission and seven states brought a case against him.
...
In addition to being banned for life from serving in any capacity in the pharmaceutical industry, Shkreli has also been permanently barred from running a public company.

[Holman]

We'll be hearing from this douchebag on social media for the rest of our lives.