Hillary vs. Martin Skerili
Posted by robgambrill 9 years, 1 month ago to Economics
Hillary Clinton declared war on pharma yesterday. The stock market got crushed.
Martin Skerli , Turning Pharmaceutical, bought rights to some drugs, and raised the price 5000 percent. Said he couldn't make a profit otherwise, but he did raise the price quite dramatically.
Maybe he raised the price too high, he got clobbered in the press and backed down on the increase.
But they are his drugs, shouldn't he have the right to set the price for them?
I suppose squishes would say it would be OK if he plowed his profits into research and building his company, but not OK if he bought a yacht with the extra cash.
I say it is his decision, and he has to live with it.
I think if he charges too much he is inviting competition and losing the goodwill of his customers. A free market will clobber him in the long run,
Hillary thinks this is a reason for government price controls.
What do you think?
Martin Skerli , Turning Pharmaceutical, bought rights to some drugs, and raised the price 5000 percent. Said he couldn't make a profit otherwise, but he did raise the price quite dramatically.
Maybe he raised the price too high, he got clobbered in the press and backed down on the increase.
But they are his drugs, shouldn't he have the right to set the price for them?
I suppose squishes would say it would be OK if he plowed his profits into research and building his company, but not OK if he bought a yacht with the extra cash.
I say it is his decision, and he has to live with it.
I think if he charges too much he is inviting competition and losing the goodwill of his customers. A free market will clobber him in the long run,
Hillary thinks this is a reason for government price controls.
What do you think?
[From the linked article.] http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org...
".... the real problem is with our drug regulatory system. The drug is a generic and so should be cheap but the FDA has only approved one producer in the USA and as such the company has an artificial “monopoly.” Jacking the price of the drug is only possible because the government makes even producing a generic drug very costly."
"The drug is a generic and not under patent so this isn’t a case of IP protectionism. The story as I read it is that Martin Shkreli, the controversial CEO of Turing pharmaceuticals, noticed that there was only one producer of Daraprim in the United States and, knowing that it’s costly to obtain even an abbreviated FDA approval to sell a generic drug, saw that he could greatly increase the price."
She gets attention and plays the savior.
He gets a higher price for the drug that he just bought.
As for the rest of the pharma market, you can be certain that Hillary ran the idea past the pharma lobbyists before she made it public.
She has already made a "deal" that will mean more pharma profits, but appears to mean cheaper costs to patients.
And, no, she has no right to demand anything because she has no product to compete with the ones that pharma has. If she did have, she would be demanding higher prices.