The Washington Post
09/23/2015
A Defining Moment in Modern Health Care
Martin Shkreli is healthcare's Gordon Gekko, its wolf of Wall Street, the symbol of all that makes people uneasy about an industry that seeks to make money by selling treatments while vowing to care only about the well-being of vulnerable patients.
Shkreli’s actions were shocking for a simple reason: it was an unusual moment of complete transparency in health care, where motives, prices and how the system works are rarely ever talked about so nakedly. Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of Daraprim from $18 to $750 per pill simply because he could.
“I think it reflects a widespread appreciation that pricing for drugs is entirely irrational in this country and the pharmaceutical industry has total control over prices and there’s no rationality to the system,” said Peter B. Bach, a physician and director of the center for health policy and outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “It’s such a perfect, crystalline example of everything that can be done, given the lack of rationality in the system, and the total bankruptcy of the justifications for high drug prices in the first place.”
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