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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that he hurt a lot of sick people by making it very difficult or impossible for them to afford the hundreds of percent price increases he laid upon the drugs he took control over.

Edit:

[0] "... it says that the drug is available for free to people with deep financial need. But Dr. Aberg has watched her patients have to "jump through the hoops" to get it. Patients have to prove both financial need and health status, something that's difficult to focus on when their lives are in danger. In June, one of her patients gave up on the process. The patient switched therapies, only to suffer a negative side effect."

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/news/economy/daraprim-aids-d...

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He raised the price of Daraprim in order to fund R&D to find alternative treatments as Daraprim caused some nasty side effects. It was free to any individual who wished to obtain it, with Martin footing the bill. The side effect of the price hike was the insurance companies has to pay more, not individuals. So no, one couldn't argue he hurt a lot of sick people.

Isn't this an extreme example of the core problem why the US health system is so expensive? Even you are suggesting that an increased price is fine if it's the insurance companies paying the money.

>The side effect of the price hike was the insurance companies has to pay more, not individuals.

I keep seeing this, don't you realize that those increased insurance costs are passed on to the people paying for insurance?

>He raised the price of Daraprim in order to fund R&D to find alternative treatments as Daraprim caused some nasty side effects.

You shouldn't buy into his PR efforts, take a look at this:

Shkreli admitted his company sold the same form of pyrimethamine, or Daraprim, that had been on the market for 70 years — although he expressed hope that his company could develop a more potent form of the drug that did not hinder the body’s production of folic acid.

“The mechanism of the drug is folate inhibition,” Anandya reminded the CEO, adding that what Shkreli had proposed might not even be scientifically possible.

“The entire mechanism of the drug is to stop the production of folic acid in the first place and the bulk of its side effects are tied up with that,” Anandya said. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive to say that you are going to solve this problem when it’s not a problem as much as the whole raison d’etre of the drug. This I find is the main problem with your plan. That the solution is not worth $749.”

“One cannot suggest such a (monstrous) increase in the price of a drug which by your own admission does nothing better while telling me your plan is to (because this is the only way it would work) create an entirely new drug not related to pyrimethamine at all because it would require a new structure,” the physician continued. “Which in turn would give you a big hassle since you would require testing and FDA approval from scratch anyway. I think your plan is flawed.”

from: http://www.alternet.org/economy/pharma-bro-martin-shkreli-ge...

1. There is no evidence of any R&D efforts. He did "market research", i.e. finding new drugs to acquire and hike the price on.

2. It was absolutely 100% not free to any individual who wished to obtain it. If you had no insurance you might (or might not) get it for free, but if you had lousy insurance you could get stuck with a 20% copay, which means you have to pay $18,000 out of pocket -per month-. Also, hospitals stopped having Daraprim in stock because of the price hike which means people with acute cases are no longer able to start treatment immediately.

3. If you can't argue he hurt a lot of sick people, why are doctors and other healthcare professionals arguing exactly that?

I think you've been drinking the Shkreli cool-aid.

I think you should start a pharmaceutical company to help these sick people.

What's interesting is that people are outraged at medicine prices but nobody wants to start a company to develop new molecules and sell them at the cheap. This shows that people realize that prices much lower than current are not sustainable. There is just a lot of R&D involved. But that realization does not prevent people from bitching about it or ascribing blame to people who are just doing what is viable for their business.

> It was free to any individual who wished to obtain it, with Martin footing the bill.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/news/economy/daraprim-aids-d...

So in order to save ~100% on a $100,000 treatment, they have to "jump though the hoops" and prove they need it (otherwise everyone would just do that?). OK?

There's nothing like laying down a thick bureaucratic obstacle of red-tape on thousands of very sick people during the key moments of their treatment.

It wasn't always a $100,000 treatment. Shkreli made it a $100,000 treatment with the justification being that the poor could still obtain it for free. But then he puts a bunch of beauracratic roadblocks in the way and it's their fault they don't jump through his hoops? For a pill that costs $1 outside the US and which he made $750? Come on man.

I'd imagine the roadblocks are there to prevent people abusing the system. And the rest of the roadblocks are by the FDA and perhaps CBP, right? Otherwise people could just import the $1 pills and be fine.

If it turns out Turing was acting malicious and intentionally tried to block people from getting the medication despite knowing they were eligible, that's a different story. But I'm hardly going to take the word of biased medical professionals on it.

Martin put a face to all this, pointed out a huge flaw in this system and made money doing it. Then to top it off, he dares to laugh at everyone in the system about it (like in [1]).

If Martin had just hid behind normal pharma PR, few people would be outraged, it'd just be general grousing with little airtime.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EXsVfiFbp8

>Martin put a face to all this, pointed out a huge flaw in this system and made money doing it.

Martin did not "point out a huge flaw", he got caught exploiting a huge flaw and is narcissistic enough to believe that he could sell that exploitation as something other than it is. The sad thing is that because he's "computer nerdy" a bunch of other "computer nerdy" people have fallen for the con.

>I'd imagine the roadblocks are there to prevent people abusing the system.

He could not have roadblocks and let the drug be cheap just like it was for decades. This is on Shkreli.

>But I'm hardly going to take the word of biased medical professionals on it.

Medical professionals are biased but the guy jacking up drug prices 5000% isn't? We're taking him at face value? pfft.

To be fair, he was not convicted of that, and it's arguable whether that entailed committed a crime.

The particular crime that he was charged with and convicted of was "victimless"-ish. That is, he lied to investors, basically running a Ponzi scheme (specifically, reporting that their balance was higher than it actually was to prevent them from trying to pull out their money), but instead of the usual deal where the scheme collapses, he managed to make enough money to make his investors whole.

Is that true? He has repeatedly said that if they are paying for it directly, he will give it to them for free (or $1 or so?) -- that the prices were only for insurers. Certainly it should be easy to find people that got hurt and he denied to help, right?

Also, this is the system's fault for giving a monopoly on a product to someone. Who knows how many other medicines are out there existing purely on someone's kindhearted desire to not make money.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/news/economy/daraprim-aids-d...

This is not true. The drug was given away for free to people who could not afford it. Are there any cases of what you're saying actually happening?

Tim Horn of the Treatment Action Group and Carlos del Rio of the HIV Medicine Association, said [Shkreli's] actions were insufficient, given that patients initially treated for days at a hospital typically have to continue the treatment for weeks or months after leaving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

They said "Del Rio noted that while hospitals treat many patients initially, most are then treated at home for a couple of months, so the lower hospital price doesn’t help."

This just states that people at home, after being treated at a hospital, still need the medicine. Hospitals get 50% off, which is what your unrelated statement is about.

The medicine is a cure, you need to go through about 100 pills of it. The cost of people at home is paid by insurance. This has nothing to do with the medicine being available literally for free if you contact the company.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/25/news/economy/daraprim-aids-d...

Well damn

I have seen videos where he explains: insurance pays for the medicine, not individuals, and people who can't afford/have insurance gets them freely from government programs/their company programs.

Price gouging by pharmaceutical companies almost certainly drives up health insurance costs. It's not a victimless crime.

By his explanation: There are only a small amount of patient that patients that needs this drug. I think the number was around 2000.

Also drugs are not the largest part of insurances pay for.

That doesn't make my previous statement any less true.

Also, I'd suggest focusing on the wider picture. Price gouging on a single drug may have a minimal impact, but there have been numerous cases of drug companies artificially hiking prices of their products, which does make a substantial difference. There are numerous studies into this if you're interested.

I don't have much understanding of wider picture of drug prices and insurance to know it, but there certainly could be such issues. I think the comment I replied to was edited or I might have accidentally replied to wrong comment, I am not sure. On similar issue, here's Martin Shkreli proposing his own idea on this matter to keep prices down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbkz2VVUBLE

>insurance pays for the medicine, not individuals

And who pays for insurance? (Hint: It's individuals) Shkreli is right in that by raising the prices he wasn't really gouging the sick for thousands and thousands of dollars, he was gouging all of us with insurance for some fraction of a penny. It's still wrong.

There is a reason why most international insurers will cover your health concerns everywhere in the world except the U.S. The American health system has out of control expenses that are putting immense strain on its every seam. Making distributors or insurance companies pay much more because "fuck them" (as Shkreli proudly said) only adds to a very serious problem in American healthcare.

Good, more people should do this until it breaks and reforms. And not just do it, but do it with his face and smile. Because companies have been doing this for a long time, but there's no one to direct the anger onto.

But that's not why he was convicted, which means his conviction does nothing to discourage that.

Are there any actual cases of people saying they can't afford the drug any more?

I've read plenty of reports over the last year of people who had great difficulty getting the drug, even though it was supposedly free. I posted one such article elsewhere in this thread.

You have no clue what this court case was about, do you?

The court case doesn't have to be about that for the argument to still hold true.

1. The OP has nothing to do with the price hikes, so your argument might have been true if it was actually addressing a relevant topic

2. It's even arguable that his price hikes hurt anyone other than already rich insurance monopolies. The insurance companies would have had to cover the prices, and any people without insurance could have received the drug for free from their company. And of course the higher profits went into upgrading the drug.

> It's even arguable that his price hikes hurt anyone other than already rich insurance monopolies

It is a uniquely American perspective to assume that insurance companies are some abstracted layer of infinite money that individual people needn't worry about. But then, everyone complains about insurance premiums and they wonder why they can't be lower. What irony.

You think raising the price for a drug only used by about 2000 people raised insurance premiums at all?

It's amazing how Europeans expect Pharmaceutical companies to invest R&D into rarely used drugs when they can't make a profit.

You do know that insurance companies are limited to the amount that they can spend on overhead and have to return excess premiums to those that paid them? So yes, it hurt the insurance monopolies, and since they didn't have as much to spend on overhead (aka profit/bonuses) would have to raise premiums.

Also what upgraded version has been released? I haven't found any PubMed/FDA studies mentioning any improvements nor any studies funded by the company. Can you point me to some?

"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

Please don't correct others' grammar and prose styles.

And this comment is the reason why Trump was elected president; that we believe everything we hear without doing our own due diligence.

> that we believe everything we hear

So if I see lots of stories by doctors who had difficulty getting their patients the drug even with this program making it available for "free" I should assume all the doctors are making that up?

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