- The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Some hospitals say they now have trouble getting the drug. “We’ve not had access to the drug for a few months,” said Dr. Armstrong at Emory, who also works at Grady Memorial Hospital, a huge public treatment center in Atlanta that serves many low-income patients.
- Dr. Aberg of Mount Sinai said some hospitals will now find Daraprim too expensive to keep in stock, possibly resulting in treatment delays. She said that Mount Sinai is continuing to use the drug, but each use now requires a special review.
“This seems to be all profit driven for somebody,” she said, “and I just think it’s a very dangerous process.”
Pharmceuticals are the new mafia. It is so unbelievable how they corrupt literally everything from the medical profession to the federal government. I see this shit almost everyday at my job (I work for a local Pharmacy). I'm pretty sure there was a medication recently that had a 500% or so increase in price not mentioned in the article. They can charge this much because insurance is gonna pay in the end. It is one of the most unregulated regions of business, and honestly it is among the strongest lobbies currently in the United States. The amount of money they pour into the federal government through PAC's and 501 (c)(4)'s is disgusting.
There's an easy fix for this. That's for families of anyone unable to get the drug to sue Turing for wrongful death. It would be an easy suit to win. Doctors get successfully sued for malpractice and wrongful death for far less egregious things all the time. It could even attract class action status pretty easily if it's widespread enough. Turing would be out of business in about 2 seconds, and the drug would be on the cheap again.
Ultimately this is probably the biggest thing that we need to fix, as a nation - we need to start regulating the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. There are other nations - Switzerland and the Netherlands come to mind - that require enrollment in insurance for all of its citizens (like the ACA) but unlike what we have here, they actually actively keep the prices of medicine and insurance down and mandate that expenses cannot exceed a certain percentage of people's incomes. Even if, as a nation, we absolutely insist on never going the route of single-payer, there are other ways we can achieve universal healthcare that might be a little more palatable to certain segments of the population (though, granted, I still just want full on single-payer myself). Either way, though, the federal government needs to have more oversight and regulatory power.