Shkreli and Turing have claimed that hospitals and insurance companies will pay, while patients who can’t afford it will get a discount, or get it for free. And Nancy Retzlaff, Turing’s chief commercial officer, told the committee about her company’s efforts to get the drug to people who can’t afford it. The arrangement she described sounded like a hodge-podge, an ungainly combination of dizzyingly high prices, mysterious corporate bargaining, and occasional charitable acts—which is to say, it sounded not so much different from the rest of our medical system.
.. The Daraprim saga has as much to do with the Food and Drug Administration as with Shkreli: although the drug’s patent expired in the nineteen-fifties, the F.D.A. certification process for generic drugs is gruelling enough that, for the moment, whoever owns Daraprim has a virtual monopoly in America. (Overseas, it is much cheaper.)
.. “Congress has not really vested any authority for the F.D.A. over pricing, so we do not follow that.”
.. 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.
Working to Lower Drug Costs by Challenging Questionable Patents
Through the Coalition for Affordable Drugs, a company they formed this year, Mr. Bass and Mr. Spangenberg identify pharmaceutical patents that they consider weak or abusive. Then they request that a unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office review the legitimacy of the patents.
By mid-November, the firm had filed 33 requests for patent reviews, targeting 13 drugs from a dozen companies.
Big Pharma has become addicted to an illusion
Pharmaceuticals companies used to be research enterprises that discovered and developed drugs. Then they became marketing giants, skilled at selling as many blockbuster pills as possible. Lately, they have turned into mergers and acquisitions machines, buying and selling medicines invented by others. It is hard to view their evolution as progress.