Rupert Murdoch's WSJ reports the following:
"On Feb. 10, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. bought the rights to a pair of life-saving heart drugs. The same day, their list prices rose by 525% and 212%."
"Early last year, Mallinckrodt PLC paid $1.4 billion for Cadence Pharmaceuticals, though the Ofirmev pain injections that were the crown jewel of the deal were projected to have just $110.5 million in 2013 revenue, according to a Mallinckrodt conference call with analysts discussing the deal. Three months later, the list price for a package of 24 Ofirmev vials jumped almost 2½ times to $1,019.52, according to health-care data firm Truven Health Analytics."
"Horizon Pharma PLC upped the price of Vimovo pain tablets after buying the rights from AstraZeneca in late 2013. On Jan. 1, 2014, its first day selling Vimovo, Horizon raised the list price for 60 tablets to $959.04, a 597% increase. Horizon raised the price again on Jan. 1 this year to $1,678.32 for the tablets."
What is the reason for these drug price increases? Even the drug dealers admit it: “Our duty is to our shareholders and to maximize the value.”
And who are these shareholders? Well, there are likely a few who have these companies' stocks in their IRA or their 401k or their mutual fund. But these are certainly NOT the people who the drug dealers are thinking of when they want to "maximize" their shareholder's value. And these are certainly NOT the people who are demanding that the companies raise the drug's prices to these unconscionable levels.
So who are the "shareholders" who demand so much profit from drugs these companies had no hand in developing? Well, you can bet that they are among the people whom we call the 0.1%. And you can bet that they have really good health insurance (Or in the case of Valeant, which is a Canadian company, a government-controlled health plan which does not allow pharmaceutical price-gouging.) And you can bet that they never worry about being unable to afford medicines like their own over-priced drugs.
In the words of Don McCanne "Thus the pharmaceutical firms are compounding the inequitable shift of capital from the workers to the wealthy (described by Piketty, Saez and others). This is being done through financial constructs for which Wall Street is so infamous. As patients, we are powerless to impede this process. It is the responsibility of government to provide the appropriate oversight to correct these injustices. Yet what did they do? Through the Affordable Care Act they handed more power and control over to the insurers and the pharmaceutical firms, leaving us at their mercy, even though mercy is not a quality found in amoral corporations."