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Drug Firm Offers $1 Version of $750 Daraprim Pill (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: We recently read about a U.S. company that bought the rights to a drug called Daraprim and then boosted the price over 5,000%. There was widespread outrage over this blatant price gouging, most of it focused on hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli. Now, a San Diego-based drug company called Imprimis has stepped in to fill the void. They announced that they'll be supplying capsules containing the same active ingredients in Daraprim for $1 per dose. Their CEO, Mark Baum, said they'll also start making alternative versions of other generic medicines that have skyrocketed in price lately. "Imprimis, which primarily makes compounded drugs to treat cataracts and urological conditions, will work with health insurers and prescription benefit managers in each state to make its new capsules and other compounded generic medicines widely available, Baum said."
This guy is a multiple-time asshole
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow So there are drug companies out there who /aren't/ out to gouge every last penny out of the sick, disabled and dying...
My faith in humanity just increased somewhat -.o
Just hope Imprimis can actually afford to supply everyone at that rate, they're probably taking a loss doing that.
a good, healthy profit by helping those who are ill, but not an outrageous one on the back of gouging the sick.
But this whole story just seems... odd. Just to rehash it - a billionaire deuce canoe "with much evil" buys a company and hikes a drug price, and goes on TV to brag about it. Anyone not mentally retarded knows what happens here, it generates such outcry against the canoe captain that he gets 24x7 news coverage for a few weeks. Nobody is naive enough to think they would be immune to backlash here. Before the price hike can have any real long-term impact, angel company #2 comes out and says they'll supply our little angels with this miracle for $1, because think of the children.
Does anyone not find this odd? I mean, I don't know what the world has done to me, but it sounds like a setup from the very beginning. Either a bid to kill off the original company, to drive up stock in angel company #2, or some other motive that I just can't fathom.
I wonder though... at a dollar a pill... when you compare it to 750, it seems insanely tiny. But look at your bottle of ibuprofin, at $13 for 1,000 capsules, you see that even at a buck a pill they are still easily able to stay in the black.
I realize not every pill has the same manufacturing cost, but they are at least within an order of magnutude of each other for the most part. At a buck a pill, that bottle above would be $1,000. It's $13, and they're still making a margin off it. I'd be surprised if this $750 drug costs over 76 times as much to manufacture in quantity as another drug.
They're trying to recoup an R&D lost. I get that. That's OK. But they've had years to do that. That's precisely why we have patents. But when your time is up, that knowledge is transferred to the public. It's up to you as a developer to use your time wisely and recoup your investment and reap a reward for your innovation. But then you have to give it up. If you still don't feel you've managed to get enough back out of the system by that point, then you're doing something wrong, and have no one to blame but yourself.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.