Every now and then I stumble across something that gives my belly a serious twist; stories that are so difficult to believe, they seem to come from a Hollywood script.
Imagine you’re the parent of a little child. Imagine that child has a life-threatening disease that is essentially untreatable but for one medicine available to you.
Now imagine that medicine is made by one, small pharmaceutical company, and one day in 2007, they raised the price of your child’s medicine from $1,650.00 a vial, to $28,000.00, NOT because the price increase reflected a sudden change to the complexity required to manufacture the drug.
No, they increased the price to $28,000.00 because you can’t get the medicine anywhere else, and your little child needs it to stay alive. The company insists they can’t now lower the price because their shareholders will sue them.
Is it just me, or does that sound like a small variant of, “I was only following orders!”?
A quote from the pharmaceutical’s CEO, referring to the company’s profitability:
We’ll take it where it goes,” Mr. Bailey says of Acthar. “It’s taken us to places we never expected.
Yes indeed, Mr. Gekko . . . uhh . . . Bailey. Right to the gates of perdition.
