could be a boon for the industry, and for patients, because the income could fund additional research and development
This argument always irritates me, because when dealing with health care and medications, jacking of the prices has real world consequences for consumers in the short term, either through an increase in the cost of the meds that they need to actually live and in overall cost to their insurance premiums. It’s not acceptable to balance the possibility of future rewards in the abstract against the actual real world effects of such policies in the present.
Many of these pharma companies (hell, many of the major corporations in any field) are already sitting on plenty enough profit to reinvest in R&D. If they say otherwise, they are lying. If they do need more money, how about cutting executive pay? That seems a good place to start, if you ask me.
Plus, we managed to have plenty of R&D that created all sorts of useful drugs that did not depend on jacking up costs on a single, necessary drug that can lead to the deaths of numerous individuals (now there were certainly many other major ethical problems in previous decades). If the states and Federal government started putting money back into the large, public land grant universities, those places could once again become engines of great research for any number of useful public goods that do not depend on the entrenchment of social and economic inequality the way the current system is set up.
And this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for Elijah Cummings to say, since it was his constiuents who suffered because of him deciding that it’s okay to jack up the price of a drug so much:
Elijah Cummings, of Maryland, is the ranking Democrat on the committee, and he used his allotted time to deliver a scolding. “Somebody’s paying for these drugs, and it’s the taxpayers that end up paying for some of them,” he said. “Those are our constituents.”
And then the author says:
Cummings acted as if Shkreli were the only thing preventing a broken system from being fixed.
With regards to this quote:
“I know you’re smiling, but I’m very serious, sir,” he said. “The way I see it, you can go down in history as the poster boy for greedy drug-company executives, or you can change the system—yeah, you.”
Which is disingenuous at best. I don’t think that Cummings meant that he was the only one who could fix the system, but that as an executive, he had a role in helping to fix that system. The system we live under is set by people making choices, and Shkreli had choices that could have helped people or hurt them, and he clearly made a decision to hurt people (for whatever reason).
As for Cummings bearing responsibility, if he votes for tighter federal regulation, but the vote goes against regulation, what responsibility does he bear for that? The author wants us to not hold Shkreli responsible for his actions, but we get to blame Cummings for what the GOP controlled congress does?
And he should be aware that his plan will require more medical entrepreneurs, not fewer.
Again, disingenuous, because it wasn’t solely "medical entrepreneurs who built the foundation for medical R&D alone. Quite a bit of it was done with federal dollars, state dollars, by researchers working at public universities, both here and abroad. It’s not like we were all dependent on the village midwife and then corporations all of a sudden started making modern medicines. They play a role today, but the PROFITING off human illness isn’t a great way to actually make us healthier. Corporate intevention between us and doctors is a major part of the problem. If keeping someone sick is going to improve the bottom line over making people healthy, then that’s what corporations will decide to do.
One of the strangest things about the anti-Shkreli argument is that it asks us to be shocked that a medical executive is motivated by profit.
I find it strange that profit is considered such a moral good that it’s okay to put human lives at risk.
“a serious risk of bringing the entire pricing structure of the industry under much heavier scrutiny and regulation.”
I agree that this was what should have happened, because he’s just the tip of the very sick iceberg. Of course, he becomes a scapegoat instead of a symbol and that indeed is a problem. But it seems like author wants to argue that the system is really okay, because as long as it operates on capitalist principles, then it’s okay for public health to be a secondary concern. I have to say that it’s not okay for that to be the case. You can’t let the free market handle everything, because not everything can be made profitable in a way that isn’t destructive to human life.
But Shkreli seems intent on proving a point about money and medicine, and you don’t have to agree with his assessment in order to appreciate the service he has done us all. By showing what is legal, he has helped us to think about what we might want to change, and what we might need to learn to live with.
And what changed because of this? And how is his jacking up the cost of a drug a good way to make this already incredibly well known problem more evident. Literally anyone who depends on a drug to live day to day, and especially those who have to pay out pocket or pay insurance premiums, knows that there is a problem. We’ve been talking about this problem for literally the past 2 decades, as the Baby boomers aged… and some dudebro saunters in and expects to be lauded for jacking up the cost of a drug? Once again, that action has real world consequences. Maybe he could have made the exact same point by actually talking publicly about these problems, or dramatically lowering the price of a particular drug for the exact same effect. People would not be the collateral damage and would actually benefit and he’d get to make some big dramatic statement about the cost of drugs in America.
I just don’t buy this argument, honestly.
