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DRUG COMPANY GOUGING - Under "Free Market" Banner, Charge Whatever They Want |
| (09/26/2015) |
| US CITIZENS PAY SUPER HIGH DRUG PRICES, DRUGS CHEAP IN OTHER COUNTIES
Why do drug companies charge so much? Because they can. Marcia Angell is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1953, a new drug was released by Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company based in London. Pyrimethamine, as the compound was named, was originally intended to fight malaria, after the microorganisms that cause the disease developed resistance to earlier therapies. The drug was used against malaria for several decades, often in combination with other compounds. It's mostly used now to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be life-threatening in people whose immune systems are suppressed, for example, by HIV/AIDS or cancer. More than 40 years later, Burroughs Wellcome merged with the British pharmaceutical giant Glaxo. In 2010, the company, now GlaxoSmithKline, sold the U.S. rights to pyrimethamine which is marketed under the brand name Daraprim to another firm, CorePharma. By then, the patent on the drug had long since expired, but because nobody bothered to make a generic, Daraprim was essentially a monopoly. In August, there was another significant development in the drug's history: CorePharma's parent company, Impax Laboratories, sold it to Turing Pharmaceuticals. Almost immediately, the company raised the price from $18 a pill to $750, a more than 40-fold increase, and this past week it sent its brash chief executive, Martin Shkreli, out to aggressively defend the new cost. READ REST OF STORY Why do drug companies charge so much? Because they can. By Marcia Angell for the Washington Post
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