Everyone’s favorite Big Pharma company Turing Pharmaceuticals has released a statement about how they are not going to lower the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim. Good job, Turing Pharmaceuticals!
In an announcement on Tuesday, the company said that the list price of Daraprim, which jumped from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill earlier this year, will not change. Instead, the company will offer hospitals up to 50 percent discounts and will make other adjustments to help patients afford Daraprim, a drug used to treat a parasitic infection and often given to HIV patients.
This isn’t a total surprise. Weeks after going on a public relations campaign saying Turing would lower the price of Daraprim, a PR campaign that made most people dislike Martin Shkreli more than is humanly possible, Turing Pharma had yet to adjust the price whatsoever. Turing figured out that they can pass on the cost to the insurance companies and then further onto the consumers—which was the plan in the first place, because as the New York Times points out:
Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor at Emory University and chairman of the H.I.V. Medicine Association, said that even with the 50 percent discount to hospitals, the drug was still much more expensive than it was five months ago. “They are still pricing it way above what the price of the medication should be,” he said.
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Such patient assistance programs are standard for companies selling extremely high-priced drugs. They enable the patients to get the drug while pushing most of the costs onto insurance companies and taxpayers.
[my emphasis]
In the end, remember this—Martin Shkreli wasn’t wrong when he kept saying that this was business as usual amongst the big pharmaceutical companies. It isn’t an aberration. This isn’t unique to Big Pharma either. Any unregulated market is rife with greed and abuse by the wealthiest businesses exploiting corporate welfare breaks. Martin Shkreli isn’t the singular villain here, he just looks perfect for the part.