Takeaway 1: Everyone understood WHY the decision was made to raise the priceâbecause heâs a greed-driven sociopath who doesnât care about sick people and he thought he could get away with it. Thatâs where all the anger came from.
Takeaway 2: Internet shaming (occasionally) works.
And a Republican would say to all this:
âSee? The system works! Market forces let the price rise, but market forces also caused the price to fall. We really donât need Big Government interfering in this process at all!â
So if weâre lucky Shkreli ends up bankrupt and unemployed, but that doesnât really fix the underlying problem. How do you price these drugs?
Trusting market forces doesnât really work when even a 60 year old generic drug essential for survival can be a monopoly, and not all CEOs are going to be as incompetent as Shkreli when trying to raise the price.
Do you have massive deregulation? A standard legislation for setting prices?
Molten gold? That sounds like an expensive way to silence someone. Iâm not suggesting an alternative, but just pointing out an impracticality.
It all shakes out in the crematorium.
He claims to have lowered the price, but has neither really reversed it nor claimed to have reversed it.
The passive voice is always a red flag.
Actually, it doesnât make sense. It means the increase was nonsense to begin with.
My wife once got a splint after spraining a finger, and the doctorâs office billed her for a surgery. I called to complain and they immediately offered to cut the charges in half. I considered it an admission of nonsense, and declined the offer, although many people probably give in. I told them I would report them to the insurance company for fraud, so they changed the procedure. I still reported them.
There were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this actionâŚ
Psychopaths are so frequently condemned from their own lips⌠âIt wasnât MY fault!â
Molten lead would work as well. It was tested and produced a cited paper.
The governments will be much less helpful here than a small rig for production of complex chemicals on every kitchen table.
We have to make it happen.
We have the technology.
Phew! we did it, guys! Now all we need to do is rally a huge individual public outcry for every instance of sociopathic greed from now until the end of time (hopefully they are all as transparent and easy for the evening news watcher to grasp!) Weâve got nothing else to do, right?
These investment bankers SO deify the free market that they really DO believe that if they CAN charge more they SHOULD charge moreâŚIt is an unrecognized religion, and these guys are fanatics. Not as inyourface violent as ISIS, but surely the cause of plenty of pain and just as sure as the Jihadis that their actions are not merely something that they can get away with but that they are morally âright.â
Ethics 101.
Compare and contrast the morality of this man with the one in an earlier story who punched a 78-year old man in the face to get more Nutella samples. Both threaten the old and infirm for gain. Does the scale of this manâs operation make it respectable? If the state has drafted laws that allow one and not the other, should the state assume the right to bring the rewards of first case more comparable with the second?
The Forbes article⌠yep, with Sovaldi at $84,000 per treatment, is a GREAT bargain, yea. Thats roughly 2,5 times my yearly salary, and I have a high salary over here in Spain, where the national healthcare system will not cover it because being so expensive and being cash-strapped due to politics, well, it is not cheaper than having a patient live their whole life with the old medicine. If I ever get Hepatitis-C diagnosed, Iâm not going to see that wonderful breakthrough at all.
And this is in a godless socialist country. So basically they have priced it so it is of absolutely no use to make the life of a lot of real patiens because well, were is the big money in that?
Slowly acquiring the materials. I actually looked up the synthesis for Daraprim; it doesnât seem undoable for the home chemist, You can get p-chlorophenylacetonitrile for about $30 from Sigma-Aldrich.
You would have to work out and effective purification, but LCC works really well for most small-scale purifications. Working out purity and identity could be a challenge without some expensive equipment though.
Ion mobility spectrometers look like an achievable opensource tech for this task. All the components are rather simple, no vacuum, can work with filtered air as the working fluid.
Raman is also relatively easy, thereâs even some hackaday project for one. Coupled with Echelle gratings it could be even pretty high-res.
LCC? I forgot this acronym⌠Some sort of preparative chromatography?
Make it legal for American consumers, doctors, and hospitals to buy medications from foreign sources and this problem vanishes.
Not sure, drug regulation and approval IS important.
Maybe some legal framework for mutual acceptance of drug approvals based on an common standards? But how to avoid fuck-ups like the corporate-loving treaties (CETA, TPP, TTIP, name your favorite trade agreement)?
The guy was claiming the price increase was to help finance development of a new and better drug to replace the old one. I donât understand why more people arenât pointing out how ridiculous this is. It would be like Ford saying they were going to completely redesign the Mustang, and the last for the necessary R&D, they had to double the price on the current Mustang. Thatâs not how this works. Thatâs not how any of this works. You recoup development costs AFTER the new product is released, not before. This isnât just ethically bad, itâs actually bad business practice.
Itâs my acronym for liquid column chromatography (AKA good old-fashioned gravity chromatography the way God and Jesus intended it.)
Weâre talking here about drugs that have been approved many years ago and manufactured/sold worldwide for a decade or more.
