Martin Shkreli launches website to shame pharma greed, sleaze
pharmaskeletons.com
pharmaskeletons.com
I'm much more turned-off by people that hide in the shadows. Shkreli might exploit the system, but he'll do so in a way that makes it patently obvious which doors need to be closed, and he'll make a joke of it while he does it.
Seems to me he's the George Hotz of the pharmaceuticals industry.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gjB1PSXv_oAUSAQ16S0fA/vid...
The people who DO make these decisions think very differently from you. They're all part of the system, and the system is obviously fundamentally broken. Us sitting around and whining about sociopaths doing sociopathic things is not going to make them stop being sociopathic and making decisions that negatively affect peoples' health and lives.
Shkreli is somewhat unique in terms of how much of an attention hog and braggart he is, though. Plus his stock fraud and general asshole persona.
It's easy to argue the action is parasitic and adds no value.
Notwithstanding which, this case exhibits none of those characteristics. It is rent-seeking, pure and simple.
Not quite. Supply and Demand don't quite work that way.
Arguably - if someone 'needs it' then they 'must pay' ergo zero sum ... but in reality demands for most drugs is not quite so inelastic (Ambien, opiods etc.). That said, I'm not sure what the drug in question does.
That assumes that he is actually pocketing the money. Shkreli was a hedge fund manager and multimillionaire before starting his pharma companies, and claims he has a $0 salary at Turing.
In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVQOZDKlRE , he lays out his reasoning for raising the price of Daraprim to prices near those of similar drugs. He intends to use the money Turing makes from Daraprim to produce drugs that are not, in his words, "terrible".
There were 39,513 AIDS patients in the United States in 2015. About 23% of Americans have toxoplasmosis, so that would be 9087 people who could get toxoplasmic encephalitis. Around 10% of people with toxoplasmosis develop toxoplasmic encephalitis [0], which would be 909 people who need Daraprim.
A course of Daraprim costs $75,000. For 909 people, that would be a total of $68,175,000. Approximately 100M people in the United States have insurance, so that would raise your insurance cost by about $0.68.
[0] 10.2% seroprevalence of toxoplasmosis, and 1.2% incidence of toxoplasmic encephalitis in the study at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1258/0956462053654230
He argues most patients won't directly experience that hike because of insurance, and that no one who can't directly afford the increased price will be denied access to it because of Turing's assistance programs. He also argues that the real issue is that there's nothing stopping the company from trying to extract that money from insurance companies, and the government in some cases (and from that I infer that it's a case where if you're the company not taking advantage of the system, you won't be a company for long). And that all the vitriol at the price hike should be directed at what's a fundamentally broken system, in his opinion.
He is a primarily a stock manipulator who specializes in biotech stocks. Before his drug pricing hijinks he started and shuttered to hedge funds, both of which failed owing millions of dollars to cover trades they had made.
He is about as knowledgable about pharmaceuticals as a third tier equity analyst. He's not a researcher -- his degree is in business.
(Don't get me wrong -- I have no love for the pharmaceutical industry. But this guy is nothing more than a promoter.)
To paraphrase: that Shkreli is using "the system" in its most absurd/brutal/greedy/evil capacity in order to highlight the absurdity/brutality/greed/evil inherent in the system.
It's just as easy to make the tech industry look like a piece of shit. Especially with AI and self-driving cars. How dare Gooogle and YC take away jobs from hard-working middle-class Americans. It's almost worse, instead of price gouging, tech is going to take away jobs of many if not all Americans in the near future, but nobody on here wants to state that fact and say how sleazy tech is.
Now is more important than ever to be truthful with ourselves and how the world works and not get hyped up over shit, until we understand the whole process. Let's problem solve instead of name call and understand the process of things. Like how YC is testing a universal wage for people in Oakland.
price gouging can in effect become a sort of extortion.
yes, one can find comparable situations elsewhere, but the hard "choices" rarely achieve the dire potential of healthcare i suspect.
How does this justify anything? Lots of sleazy things are common practice. Some are legal, some are illegal. Commonality and legality aren't really strong justifications for anything.
Shkreli may have been singled out in the court of public opinion, but that doesn't make what he did any less contemptible.
> It's just as easy to make the tech industry look like a piece of shit... but nobody on here wants to state that fact and say how sleazy tech is.
Really? Because I literally haven't seen a single self-driving thread on HN in the past several years that doesn't contain a highly-voted and somewhat lengthy comment thread about this.
See also literally every HN UBI thread for the past several years.
And that's just comment threads. Yesterday alone there were two stories on the front page for most of the day about social consequences of self-driving.
So it seems like people -- especially self-driving people -- are thinking about this, have a wide variety of opinions on the trade-offs. And when they believe as you do, often actively advocate for policies that would help the people whose jobs they might displace.
There's also the fact that technology (both self-driving and drugs) brings good along with the bad. Perhaps if Shkreli had created a new drug and then price gouged that drug, the situation might be a bit more comparable. But that's not what happened.
> Now is more important than ever to be truthful with ourselves and how the world works and not get hyped up over shit
Or, in Shkreli's case, understand how the world works and also get hyped up over shit. His business model should be illegal.
Nothing besides the FDA is stopping a competitor from selling generic Daraprim. And if it's not economically viable, then maybe the government should contract at fixed prices to ensure the availability of otherwise unfeasible drugs.
By analogy, insecure software is both common and also often inexcusable. Incentives are not aligned to encourage secure software. That's a real structural problem. But those problems don't make credit card theft morally permissible.
Also, I think what Martin does should be illegal. And also that the behavior is reprehensible even when it's not illegal. Criticism and action aren't mutually exclusive...
How can it become a better drug? It's a specific chemical compound.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/01...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/arts/music/martin-shkreli...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/02/martin-shkr...
He sat down and said what he needed to say. At least he's not afraid to speak his mind.
But maybe that's too much to hope and he's just slinging mud. Hard to tell without digging into the details but the article does say this:
Not all his claims are backed up, explained, or accurate. But the site still offers an embarrassing catalogue of bad deeds, which Shkreli told STAT he would continually update.
I'm hoping Ars wouldn't have published the article at all unless they put at least some stock in his claims.
Are you ok with being price-gouged on your healthcare as long as the pharma companies say "please" and "thank you"?
California, seemed to do the same thing, by having patrons ask for water at restaurants. Obviously, the benefits of this weren't just that the directly saved water, but the indirectly saved water of making people think twice about water usage.
Regardless, I think most people like thinking in the concrete rather than the abstract, which makes it easy to shit on a specific person like Martin Shkreli, instead of the whole pharma industry.
>This week, a pharmaceutical trade group stepped up its efforts to distance itself from Martin Shkreli, the disgraced ex-CEO of several drug companies who gained notoriety for an eye-popping drug price increase and an indictment for securities fraud. The trade group even made a television ad to try to bolster its image and make clear that it is different—better—than the likes of Shkreli and his greedy ways.
His whole story even made him a character Watch Dogs 2.