Citing 'Moral Requirement To Make Money', Pharma CEO Jacks Drug Price 400% (arstechnica.com)

The chief executive of a small pharmaceutical company defended hiking the price of an essential antibiotic by more than 400 percent and told the Financial Times that he thinks "it is a moral requirement to make money when you can." From a report: Nirmal Mulye, CEO of the small Missouri-based drug company Nostrum Laboratories, raised the price of bottle of nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392 last month. The drug is a decades-old antibiotic used to treat urinary-tract infections caused by Escherichia coli and certain other Gram-negative bacteria. The World Health Organization lists nitrofurantoin as an essential medicine. In an interview with the FT, Mulye went on to say it was also a "moral requirement" to "sell the product for the highest price," and he explained that he was in "this business to make money."

Comments

Making money is not a "moral requirement"

[Anonymous Coward]

But maybe it's what they teach at MBA courses.

Anyhow, time to decommercialise medicine. Yes, I know it sounds pinko commie socialist. Even so.

Re:Making money is not a "moral requirement"

[layabout]

Markets can't correct this behavior because drugs are effectively a monopoly situation. Not just from the patent perspective but from the biological. When treating a condition, it's not uncommon to find that a patient can't tolerate one drug but can another. A classic example of this is statins. The protocol for using statin says if a patient can't tolerate the cheap ones, gradually try the increasingly more expensive ones until you find one that works. If the patient can only tolerate one particular drug to treat a condition, there is no market (i.e. only one supplier, the drug that works). The only power the patient has is to decide whether or not to treat the condition. There is no way the patient can put any pressure on the drug manufacturer to change pricing. If anything, the drug manufacturer is saying "you want to live? Don't ask about the price, just pay it."

Re:Making money is not a "moral requirement"

[Calydor]

No, this is just how a sociopath thinks. Quite literally, a sociopath thinks that anything that benefits him (regardless of what happens to the rest of the world) is morally right.

Re:Making money is not a "moral requirement"

[bondsbw]

However, you can't make it illegal for competition to exist ... without expecting the prices to be high.

Yes we can. We regulate them.

What we can't do is assume the free market will sort out a situation when we can't allow free market conditions.

I love free market competition. It works in the vast majority of economic situations. But it cannot work for markets we must heavily regulate and we shouldn't try to force it.

Yep

[American AC in Paris]

This is exactly how for-profit industries work.

Maybe instead of trying to find ways to make for-profit healthcare marginally less of a roiling tire fire for Americans, we should instead nationalize healthcare, like the rest of the civilized world.

:|

Re:Same Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Europeans and Canadians aren't starving.

In fact, they are far better off than the average american.

Americans are just too uneducated and unenlightened to see the benefits of proper socialised medicine.

Re:Same Thing

[j-beda]

LOL!

Who decides what is "needed"?

Who decides what is a, "priority"?

Do they just give you a pill and send you home?

Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to elected officials to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!