US Drugmaker Raises Price of Vitamins By More Than 800% (ft.com)
David Crow, reporting for the Financial Times: A US drugmaker is charging almost $300 for a bottle of prescription vitamins that can be bought online for less than $5, in the latest attempt at price gouging in the world's largest healthcare market. Avondale Pharmaceuticals raised the price of Niacor, a prescription-only version of niacin, by 809 per cent last month, taking a bottle of 100 tablets from $32.46 to $295 (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source), according to figures seen by the Financial Times. Although niacin, a type of vitamin B3, is available in over-the-counter forms for less than $5 per 100 tablets, some doctors still prefer to use the version approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat high cholesterol. Avondale, a secretive Alabama-based company, put the price of Niacor up shortly after acquiring the rights to the medicine in a so-called "buy-and-raise" deal -- a strategy made famous by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced biotech entrepreneur.
Holy shit! Godwin's law AND Poe's law rolled into one comment!
You win my Internet today!
The current approach to "draining the swamp" is to hire the alligators or appoint them to cabinet positions.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Most vitamins don'r degrade at all.
Why would they?
Relatively constant temperature, dry, no light. How do you guys think stuff can "degrade" in such conditions?
Kid: "Hey mom! Look at this! This Himalaya salt has a 'best consume before 2022' date! It must be really good!"
Mom: "yeah, we are so lucky! They dug out this perfect fine salt just last year, after it spent millions of years there! Just before the expiring date!"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Free market medical move #1 was ending the ACA (Obamacare) mandate which would financially lock most people into FDA monopoly medicines and often poorly performing maimstream medicine. Many problems can be better addressed by the closer-to-natural-biochemistry of supplements, but first you need a little money leftover to start.
Niacor is just niacin. There's no patent on Niacin since it's a natural vitamin. You can still buy Niacin without any prescription for cheaper than it was on prescription before the change.
So... your rant about Obamacare and natural supplements doesn't make any sense but the actual story doesn't make any sense either, so I guess you win?
I'm guessing it's like if AOL raised it's rates 800 percent. People like you would immediately blame government interference even though that has nothing to do with it and subscribing to AOL is totally pointless anyway.