Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/01/makers-of-epipen-overcharged-u.html
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Except it’s only completely different!
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It’s almost like the invisible hand of the market is an evil motherfucking invisible hand. Most invisible hands are inherently fucking evil, that’s just a good rule of [visible] thumb.
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I’m not trying to deflect responsability on the company and its executives, far from it.
But when I read something like that - a company that you find out has overcharged your government 1.27 billion getting out of that problem with ~ 400 million - the big question, apart from “where is my pitchfork”, is “who in bloody hell signed THAT for me???”
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I know, there needs to be a red card for shenanigans like this, no more of this barely-tinted-yellow-card bullshit. Oh, you fucked with medicine to make a quick billion? Yeah, you’re out of the game, give us all your money to fix this shit, and you, you and you, go to jail. Same with the Lexmark bullshit. At some point, you’re done, you’re rotten, we don’t want you in our marketplace anymore.
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What are you, some kind of socialist? The Free Market knows all and is infallible.
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Custodial Prison sentences for people in the C-suite.
Nothing else will do.
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That’s where the corporate death-sentence needs to come into play. (And by association the decision-makers barred from future corporate governance in any form.)
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A half a billion sounds about right…if that was a FINE to be paid on top of restitution…
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The idea that it is their ‘free market’ right to charge whatever they want for the drug ignores the fact that patents DO NOT EXIST in the free market. Part of the idea of patents protecting the right of production is an exchange for a guarantee of quality and a social responsibility.
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Some civil servant who had no choice whatsoever. That’s who.
Congress makes the laws. Any agency has to follow them. For example, Congress refused to allow the government from negotiating for drug prices in Medicare D.
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Hey, don’t even go for a formal corporate death penalty. Your fine is your entire gross income for the fiscal year.
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Just so. Like many corporate lamprey eels, they want the “free market” to begin right after they have ensured that the government has erected all the barriers to market entry. (patents, FDA approvals, medicaid funding etc.)
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Damn, that’s some good stuff from both you persons.
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Criminal charges need to be a thing against corporations, especially on a case like this. Who knows how much harm they’ve done to people’s lives and health in order to turn a profit? If someone scammed another person and then made it almost impossible for them to get by to buy medication and they got busted they wouldn’t get a restitution fine, they’d go to jail.
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Q: How many [free market] economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Had the light bulb actually needed to be changed, the market would have already responded.
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Quick Google search supports this. Thank you Late Stage Capitalism.
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No, I dont mean who signed the contract with the overcharge.
I mean, who signed the settlement.
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Ah. Sorry.
I’m sure that this will turn out to be the merely-civil sort of 1$.27 billion fraud; not the lowbrow criminal kind.
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