News With A Smirk Hedge $ Bought Drug Patent For Hiv Raised Price 5000%

[Deleted member 28740]

Article in the Guardian. 32 year old pleaded the 5th. Bought 62 year old patent on a pharma. Hopes to be a billionaire soon. Your thoughts?

http://www.theguardian.com/business...eli-refuses-to-testify-congress-drug-daraprim

"The firm Shkreli created and ran until his arrest in December, Turing Pharmaceuticals, is under fire for hiking the price of the drug Daraprim by more than 5,000% overnight, from $13.50 to $750 a pill, after acquiring it from another company.

Lawmakers Dead Link Removed showing how Shkreli sought to make $1bn from buying up the 62-year-old anti-parasite drug.

“Very good. Nice work as usual. $1bn here we come,” he said in an email to the company’s chairman as he worked to buy Daraprim for $55m in 2015. Shkreli said hiking the price of the drug would bring in an extra sales of $375m, “almost all of it profits”.

“Should be a very handsome investment for all of us,” he said. “Let’s all cross our fingers that the estimates are accurate.”

 

[Stickler]

You mean...Unregulated capitalism includes holding people's lives hostage for money, and letting them die if they can't cough it up??? Say it ain't so!

Until we institute price controls or some other mechanism to keep prices of medications down, as do other countries, this is inevitable. Why the surprise?

...Incidentally, I am given to understand that more is spent on marketing to promote existing drugs than is used for research to find new ones.
So the " we will use the profits for research! " excuse kind of does not really wash for me?
You see...
Research is hit or miss as regards profit. It's high risk. Companies prefer the government find new drugs, and I am given to understand new drugs research is well-subsidized by the government, often happening under government grants in public universities?

Proven meds are not hit or miss, though, they are profit. If allowed, companies will maximize that profit. Regardless of who dies on the way.

Shkreli is just the most public and obnoxious face of an epidemic within the industry:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...d-consumers/H3iA9CSxAUylnCdGjLNKVN/story.html

When a monopoly or near-monopoly of production exists in the market, the price is currently skyrocketing.

 

[Ed Norton]

Kinda ludicrous considering that HIV protease inhibitors are almost exactly like ACE inhibitors in basic mechanism, both are aspartic protease inhibitors.

HIV can be cured; it's actually quite simple. Permanently alter CCR5 co-receptor.

 

[Anarchy]

There's a big can of worms in there.

Arguably the idea of patents for inventions was a work around by the Stuart monarchs, after parliament stopped them from selling "patents" granting monopoly rights for other areas of activity, for example trade with the east or west indies, export of wool, smelting of lead with sea coal.

are ideas actually capable of being "property"

In other areas of activity, "property" is a convention for showing who has the rights to use or dispose of scarce goods that cannot be used for two different uses at the same time,

whether that's our own individual bodies

or a patch of land (it cannot be used for a golf course and a potato field at the same time), or an apple or orange

Those goods are "scarce" in that economic sense, that If we agree to trade my apple for your orange, I end up giving the apple up, and you giving the orange up.

but what about ideas? If we both have an idea, and we share with each other, we don't each end up with only one idea, or two half ideas. We each now have two ideas.

In that sense, Ideas are "non scarce" and the idea of property in ideas does not make sense.

There's a lot more to it, and for anyone who might be interested, I'll recommend Stephan Kinsella's book Link Removed
Incidentally, Kinsella has stated that you're welcome to put your own name on it and sell copies printed with your own ink and paper if you want to. He is intellectually consistent.
__________________________________

anyway, back to the original post
It's somewhat rich / ironic that the institution which posits the idea that intellectual property is valid, is the same one in who's court, this guy is being tried, for buying intellectual property and using it accordingly.

 

[Anarchy]

You mean...Unregulated capitalism includes holding people's lives hostage for money, and letting them die if they can't cough it up??? Say it ain't so!

It's actually the positivist legal system that has posited the laws creating the property rights in ideas, which prevent anyone with the chemical know how from offering the chemical at whatever combination of price and quality customers are willing to pay for.

on an un constrained market, this guy would be like a slum lord trying to let a room above a dry cleaners for $7M a week
he'd just be laughed at, while people went else where for their needs.

 

[Ed Norton]

Knowing a little about the innerworking of big pharma and even academic research...most are snakes who would eat their own kids for a profit. Plus they will never run out of new drugs because of combinatorial synthetic compound libraries...par for the course...I'm not surprised and it's mostly the insurance companies that should worry, although they are all in cahoots anyway. Nothing new here to be seen.

 

[Ocean5]

Come on...trickle down economics people. If he makes a billion think of all the money helpings others (being Very Sarcastic) from his profits.

 

[Ed Norton]

Alaska Airlines had in the past extended against Boeing's (McDonnell Douglass) recommendation and increased intervals between the jack screw lubrication. That is critical part that moves the vertical stabilizer. The director of maintenance refused to sign off on the unnaproved interval and even reported it. For his efforts he was fired and his career destroyed. Alaska had a failure and crashed as a result killing all. They were held criminally negligent and the FAA imposed record fines...in the end, because of insurance, Alaska made a decent profit from the crash. In airlines, this type of practice has occured several times in history. The whole point of this story was simply to say that if big pharma were just half as ethical as the airlines it would be a dramatic improvement.

 

[Stickler]

@Anarchy...India only patents the process, not the chemical.
So if you can find a different process, you can make the pharmaceutical. (Why Indian copy meds are so affordable)

...But you probably knew that

 

[ms spock]

You mean...Unregulated capitalism includes holding people's lives hostage for money, and letting them die if they can't cough it up??? Say it ain't so!

***pops head in thread***

***clears throat***

Ahem ... It ain't so!

***bolts out of the thread running at quite a pace***

 

[Stickler]

I love you ms Spock, but Oz controls its' medication prices quite strictly.

I should know, some of the interestingly-sourced asthma inhalers I got in the decade prior to this were Australian inhalers fairly close to the expiry dates.
...Even with air freight from Vanuatu they cost a third of what they cost here.
Made by the same company, just for a different market.

Advair 500/50 cost me about $175 for a one-month inhaler that way, if I bought 3 at once. Bought domestically it would have been $575 per inhaler.

Why me and the ex-wife had to move in with mom...more than half my income went for medications.

...Note that this was in the Aughts. The prices Americans pay, retail, has jumped even higher recently. Our government allows it, that's why.
...One of my inhalers that ran $80 domestic legal purchase in the aughts is now $350. Same med.
I've got coverage now, otherwise I'd be in very deep trouble.

My friend's diabetes got worse under his old insurance...b/c it did not cover test strips and he was making $10 an hour...:facepalm: But insurance stupidity is a WHOLE other story.

Actually? Though...it's not UNREGULATED capitalism, is it?
Because if it were REALLY unregulated, I'd be able to go buy my Indian pharmaceuticals at a shop!

...So...it's more like a protected, artificial close-to-monopoly market, in which competition is mostly not allowed, and price gouging is.

So? It's more accurate to say it IS a regulated market...just regulated to maximize the profit of the American pharma makers!.

Not regulated with the goals of sustainable profits and maximized public health.

 

[Anarchy]

Actually? Though...it's not UNREGULATED capitalism, is it?
Because if it were REALLY unregulated, I'd be able to go buy my Indian pharmaceuticals at a shop!

...So...it's more like a protected, artificial close-to-monopoly market, in which competition is mostly not allowed, and price gouging is.

:):):):):):):):hug:
Crony Crapitalism's other name is fascism.

There's a fairly extensive literature on the disproportionate influence that elites and special interest groups have on legislation, compared to the negligible influence that ordinary voters have.

generally that lierature came from Authors working in places like Auburn, Hillsdale, Loyola, New York Tech and ULV

There's a recent paper saying exactly the same thing, come from the very heart of the establishment: Princeton
Here's Gilen's and Page, 2014, "Testing theories of American Politics; Elites, Interest groups and Average Citizens"
http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/...testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf