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

Pregnancy test is pretty much mandatory unless she's had a hysterectomy. They're not going to give her drug one unless they *know* there is no possibility of pregnancy. I've run too many positive pregnancy tests on people who swore that wasn't possible.

Bills for ER treatment are part of why there was a push for Obamacare. You get people who could be treated for 1/4 to 1/3 of the cost in a primary care office who do not have one. They get sick and go to the ER, and everything costs lots more. As often as not the hospital then eats the bill as indigent care, maybe gets to write it off their taxes, maybe not.

 

Didn't really want to go to the ER. But it was 10 p.m., and the huge "urgent care" facility closest to us was closed. I guess nothing urgent happens between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.

 

If you had been able to get there they would have charged you, done a UA, seen blood in her urine, maybe given her an Rx for a few pain pills, and told you to go see your family doc tomorrow. He, in turn, would have charged for a visit and sent her to the hospital to check for a possible kidney stone. So it goes.

 

Yeah, my experience has been that urgent care doesn't do you any good for a kidney stone. They just sent me to the ER. In part, you've got to do some imaging to see how big the stone is, to figure out how to treat it. Small stone - can pass, but a bigger stone they'd need to do something about.

 

Our entirely coherent drug safety regime giveth and it taketh away ...

Turing Pharma has a competitor that's offering the drug at roughly $1 a pill. The competitor's exploiting a quasi-loophole in FDA regulations:

Competition Compounded

 

Just wait until there is a meningitis outbreak, and people will be calling for the company to be shut down.

 

Here comes this asshole again ...

Martin Shkreli is once again provoking alarm with a plan to sharply increase the price of a decades-old drug for a serious infectious disease. This time the drug treats Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can cause potentially lethal heart problems. ...

Mr. Shkreli said on a conference call with KaloBios investors last week that if the company won F.D.A. approval for benznidazole, it would have exclusive rights to sell it in the United States for at least five years. He said the price would be similar to that of hepatitis C drugs, which cost $60,000 to nearly $100,000 for a course of treatment.

In Latin America, benznidazole costs $50 to $100 for the typical two-month course of treatment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/b...prompts-outcry.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

 

Speaking of this douchenozzle...

Pharma’s Bad Boy Exec Martin Shkreli Paid $2 Million for Wu-Tang Clan’s New Record

 

This guy's trying to game quirks in our drug-approval process, and he's trolling people who get sucked in by these outlandish headlines ... The drug in question has never even been approved for use in the U.S., where since 1955 there have been only seven cases of the condition it treats.

The prize for him is a voucher that can be sold -- for a shitpile -- to another pharma company. That voucher allows for an expedited FDA review of whatever drug the bearer wants approved, which in essence is worth about four months or so of extra patent protection.

 

He's a colossal shitbag. That's the story.

 

What this guy needs is to come down with some extremely rare disease, and have a pharma jack its only curable drug up to $100 million a pill. Then the pill shouldn't work on him, but instead give him all the horrible side effects, including gangrene of his dick, which will then fall off. And then he should die a slow and very painful death.

But, I'm a good person and it's the holiday season, so I don't want to wish anything horrible on anyone.

Except this guy. I've sent letters to Santa and the drone strike program.

 

Can't we get this sociopathic fucker out of the pharmaceutical world? Surely there's some other less life-dependent industries out there where he can find ways to gouge the public.