Former hedge fund manager acquires life-saving drug, raises price 5,555% to $750/pill

The jackass says he is going to bring the price down.

http://gawker.com/pharmaceutical-pr...32535309#_ga=1.195191470.384547224.1419262321

 

Here's a hypothetical for the sj.com audience ...

Let's start by noting that essentially the only reason this guy's play might work is that, at present, he's got the only Daraprim-making machine there is. But you also have to remember that, in relatively short order, you could build another Daraprim-making machine. Let's say you do that.

Assume that this guy's right in thinking that, at present, the market will support a price of $750 a pill. Once you had your Daraprim-making machine up and running, what would you charge?

 

One thing I read earlier is that even though the drug is off patent, potential rivals needed a supply of the drug to test and study before they could make their own version, and Mr. Wonderful was doing all he could to gum up the works.

 

That being said, DQ poses an interesting question.

What would you charge per pill?

 

Depends on my costs of producing the machine that makes the pill. Depends on if I'm only making it or also making other things. Depends on lots of things but if $13.50 had been the going rate it would have to be more than that but not 5,000 percent more.

Since this is purely speculation, I'd guess somewhere between $45 to $75 a pill.

 

This is purely speculation, but I'm betting the great majority of people would rationalize ("I've got three kids to send to college, etc.") their way to charging whatever the market would bear. What it cost on Monday has nothing to do with what it should cost on Thursday. Just because somebody paid 1 cent for that Honus Wagner card you found in your attic doesn't mean you won't sell it for $200,000 if you can.

 

Except nobody dies if you charge $200k for some spoke noise.

 

People can die if they don't have hundreds of thousands for an organ transplant.

That fact doesn't exactly do anything to reduce the costs of these procedures, however.

 

This is the medical outrage of the week. Just wait until the NY Times writes about the high cost of cancer or HIV treatments.

 

This makes me think of the movie "John Q" where Denzel Washington's character holds an emergency room hostage in order to get some extremely expensive lifesaving transplant his insurance policy wouldn't cover.

 

We live in a world of $1,100 ambulance rides of fewer than 10 miles and $3,200 CAT scans that take less than 10 minutes.

Nothing can disgust me about our system beyond the disgust I already feel.