Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Life

Op-Ed: Big Pharma takes a hit as investors dump price gougers

The sheer ugliness of price gouging has to be seen to be disbelieved. The recent cranking up of the price of a pill of a drug called Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill caused a global uproar. A company called Valeant raised the price of two heart drugs by 525 percent and 212 percent. Gilead Sciences has a Hepatitis C drug which will be priced at $1,000 per pill, an impossible price for most people.
Ridiculous prices for meds are nothing new, but they’ve got the world’s attention. What’s called “blackmail level” drug pricing is now an election issue in the US.
The retaliation is coming from everywhere. Investors destroyed Valeant’s stock price, from $263 to $98 since August. Daraprim now has a competitor called Imprimis priced at $1 per capsule.
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last decade or so, you’ll be well aware of the effects of massive price rises in drugs in the U.S. over that time. The price rises have been life-wrecking, literally taking the food and board out of people’s mouths.
The old argument in justification of steep prices, “research costs,” has also gone stale. Someone pointed out some time ago that researchers know how to cost their work. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in research for very long.
Can every drug on the market have cost so many billions to research? Of course not. Few companies would pay that sort of money for drugs which are minor steps up or away from core medications, like antidepressants, either.
How easy it is to find stories about drug price rises. It took me a few seconds to find tales like this one from TIME’s Health, “6 Insane Examples Of Prescription Drug Price Rises,” citing the price rise for the tuberculosis drug cycloserine from $500 to $10,800 for 30 capsules, followed by a backdown to $1050 for 30 capsules. Note that this drug is used to treat an extremely dangerous, and contagious, disease.
Another like this one from QZ.com simply pointed out how normal massive drug prices were and had been for ages. The fact is that it took this long for this information get any sort of public attention. Skin care prices have gone up 401 percent since 2009, says another article from Hong Kong Standard.
Which raises the question…
Where does the money go, Big Pharma?
The pharmaceutical sector is acting like nothing more or less than a gigantic money laundry, if you look at these endless price disparities. So where does all that money go? To investors? Not if they’re dumping the stocks, it probably doesn’t.
Quite the opposite, they may be getting robbed blind, if that sort of money is coming in and disappearing, or “going to research/whatever” on the accounts. Somebody must quite literally be making billions out of this nauseating practice.
If it goes to “research,” it’s untouchable. “Whatever” could be micro transactions, or simply very, very fat bank accounts offshore. Is it money laundering? Whatever it is, it’s not a very reassuring look to anyone who knows anything about corporate finances and how to read a balance sheet.
The market actually got something right?
That’s probably why the smarter investors are bailing out. The fan is being hit, somewhere, and they’d rather not be sprayed with the results? There’s no doubt that the credibility of this financial house of cards on which Big Pharma is structuring its prices needs some medication itself. Nobody could look at huge prices without wanting to follow the money trail. Maybe someone has?
So — who’s winning Pharma Wars? Certainly not the ultra-gouged American public, which as usual has been ignored for decades until the problem became impossible to ignore. Sick people now drive around and do their work under the influence of overpriced drugs, many of which are considered garbage. If you didn’t have depression before you got your meds, your chances of getting it by paying for them are much improved.
Talking about “insane” — how sane is it to allow actual medical practices to be made impossible by pricing medication out of the reach of patients? How sane can you be not to ask where that money goes after all these years? How sane are regulators, legislators, and law enforcement agencies to “not notice” this blatant national mugging of American patients?
Many of these meds have interesting side effects, too, like “suicidal thoughts, death, etc.”. So if you’re dead and suicidal you may have a meds problem, as the old standup joke goes? Nice to know, if you don’t know that meds are supposed to solve medical problems, not cause them.
Big Pharma is an obscenity. It’s a global parasite, literally ripping out the means of support from sick people. I wonder how many people just fell to bits because they couldn’t afford their meds? Must be a lot, by now.
This is a trail of destruction. You can almost picture the old couple, getting frailer and sadder, trying to hold things together. The young family trying to pay for something for a sick kid. Some poor bastard hoping his semi-functional anti-depressants will make that bottomless hell better.
Obviously, Big Pharma, like so many other corporate psychos, feels safe in America with its venal political system protecting every corporate disaster far more effectively than an endangered species.
So where are the heroes?
It’ll be interesting to see who takes up this fight. The two sides of nothing known as political views seem about the same. Where are the heroes for these people who are so sick? Too damn cutesy PC to have any genitalia, or just too damn full of yourselves? Too gutlessly sycophantic in the right wing corporate coma-land or too much of a pack of underachievers? Come on, you thought-leading sons of bitches, take on this one.
Talk means nothing. Forget outrage. Take action. Boycott every single one of these vermin. Publish lists of price rises all over the net and keep them visible. Name, blame, and shame. Source legal drugs from other suppliers. It’s not that hard. Undercut these bastards down to their constipated bowels. Take every cent out of those stocks until they’re as worthless as the people who do things like this.
Note: A bit of further research in to pharma stocks in the US shows a dip in November, followed by some rises by majors like Pfizer, but others, like Glaxo Smith Klein, are well off their peaks. Maybe they need some aspirin? $500 per fizzy tab, guys.

Avatar photo
Written By

Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

You may also like:

World

Calling for urgent action is the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

Business

The cathedral is on track to reopen on December 8 - Copyright AFP Ludovic MARINParis’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, ravaged by fire in 2019, is on...

Business

Saudi Aramco President & CEO Amin Nasser speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas - Copyright AFP Mark FelixPointing to the still...

Business

Hyundai on Wednesday revealed plans to invest more than $50 billion in South Korea by 2026.