I also like that he's knowledgable on many on the subjects on which he speaks, half the people I've spoken to that "hate him" have no idea why other than he made a low volume drug expensive (never mind any of the details behind it)
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.)
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.