inexpensive drugs you take a few times and then are done with
For most conditions these are simply a fantasy. There are very few true "cures" in medicine, only varying degrees of palliatives. The idea that we'd all be living cancer-free to 150 years if only Big Pharma would focus on real cures is absolute nonsense, because it's extraordinarily difficult to make a drug that magically eradicates all traces of an ailment without severely damaging the host. People who think otherwise need to take a few biology courses.
Because drugs have been patented and sold for obscene piles of money, the regulatory environment has "stepped up their game," in requiring newer drugs to prove their safety and efficacy with obscenely expensive testing protocols before coming to market.
The failure rate for Phase III clinical trials is somewhere between 25% and 50% - i.e. over half of the drugs that make it through Phases I and II are still not effective enough for regulatory approval. We can therefore reasonably assume that if we get rid of Phase III trials altogether to save Big Pharma some money, half of all new drugs will actually be useless. (Except it'll probably be even worse, because without the risk of Phase III failures - which are the worst nightmare of any sane pharma CEO - they will have less incentive to discard more marginal candidates.)
But instead they spend money at cheap, incremental development
Except they don't. Big Pharma has sunk billions of dollars into developing drugs for Alzheimer's, which currently has no truly effective treatments, meaning they have to start from scratch. The failure rate is simply abysmal, so of course we're not seeing those drugs, but it's not for lack of effort.
I only whine when the Feds do all the work, on our dime, yet we end up with a drug company getting all the profits.
This is rarely the case - only 25% of new drugs originate in (presumably federally-funded) academic labs, and even those have to go through a lengthy development process mostly paid for by companies.
The reason it is so profitable for companies to continue to sell old antibiotics is that the research and marketing is largely done. It' s pure profit with no additional investment. And there is no competition because they are protected by long patent terms.
I think the patent term is only 17 years or so - and pharmaceuticals tend to have a lengthy approval process, so it ends up being shorter. Basically anything invented in the mid-1990s or earlier is off-patent (with the caveat that use for specific indications may still be patented, but this doesn't prevent doctors from prescribing it "off-label"). Viagra, for instance, was introduced in 1998 and is now generic in much of the world, and you can get off-label generics in the US even though the patent applying to erectile dysfunction lasts until 2019. So, no, "old" antibiotics are not protected by long patent terms.
some scientists only assume it from observed differences in the fossil record.
Not "assume", "infer", and anyway decades of molecular biology, genetics, and genomics have proven at least as useful as fossils. My favorite example here.
The worst example in the article: "the discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." This is just fantasy. The wool industry did indeed perform such research many decades ago (just as the pharma industry uses crystallography to design better drugs), but the technique itself was developed entirely by (mostly British and German) academics working over many decades. Companies have had a very important role in developing the hardware used in these experiments, but the research directions have mostly tended to be driven by academia, with industry looking on from the sidelines. (Not that there's anything wrong with this: drug development is already slow and expensive.)
Another counter-example that he couldn't be bothered to mention: the CRISPr-CAS system, discovered accidentally by academics interested in bacterial immunity, and probably the most powerful new molecular biology technique of this century so far. Of course there's no reason why industry couldn't fund this research, but it's an esoteric scientific field that probably didn't seem very important or commercially valuable to anyone until this particular system was discovered. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from stumbling around blindly in the dark, something that commercial enterprises are usually poorly suited for.
Veering off on a tangent here - is there a good introduction to this subject suitable for an advanced newcomer? I've been curious about this ever since I started driving on California freeways regularly in the last few years, and realized how poorly optimized many of the interchanges are for actual humans. (Anyone who has ever driven past Emeryville will know what I'm talking about.) I always pictured it as some kind of particle dynamics problem, except the particles are irrational, rage-filled morons.
University research has been corporate-funded for decades.
I don't know what other fields are like, but for biomedical research this is absolutely wrong. I worked for both public and private universities in the US for 15 years and the vast majority of scientists were getting the vast majority of their funding from the NIH, or maybe the NSF, plus a few big private foundations like HHMI. Funding from companies was not uncommon - in fact it paid my salary for a couple of years, thank you tech transfer department* - but for most researchers it was a fraction of whatever the government was giving them. (In the group where I was paid by corporate money, I was the only one, while another dozen people were paid by an NIH grant.)
(* actually, no. Working with companies as an academic can be an incredible pain in the ass and I didn't like our licensing policies anyway. And it certainly did skew our priorities somewhat, which was even more annoying. But we absolutely didn't need the money either.)
instead rely on a fairly complex set of heuristics from clinical experience, lengthy education, and a good understanding of underlying normal and abnormal physiology.
See, that's part of the problem... I went to school with pre-meds, I had to teach pre-meds, and as a scientist I am well-acquainted with the frailty of human reasoning, so the idea of my medical issues being subject to some doctor's "heuristics" is a little terrifying. (Not that I'm eager for every hypochondriac with an internet connection and access to cheap lab testing to start self-diagnosing, of course.)
sorry if this sounds confusing but it's not easy to speak techcrunch'y when you're not a native english speaker like me
Dude, I'm a native English speaker and I'm a software developer working in Silicon Valley, and I can't speak TechCrunchese either, nor can most of my coworkers for that matter. Your version sounds about right though. I think the people who are really fluent in it must take classes in college or something. (Or maybe this is what Stanford fraternity membership gets you?)
it tips over from looking like "impressive board" to weird and kind of suspicious
I saw it described as "The Illuminati" on another message board. Personally, I automatically distrust anything associated with Kissinger - in a decent and just world, he'd be serving out a life sentence.
It means if we ever did see another Great War style conflict no nation, even the other large nuclear powers, can threaten our home land.
That was actually an important motivation of many of the scientists who promoted nuclear research in the 1920s and 1930s - they'd just witnessed a devastating war of attrition, and thought that nuclear weapons would not only make this kind of war obsolete, they'd make the entire concept of war between nuclear-armed nations unthinkable. It's important to remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, by themselves, no worse than any number of other atrocities committed by the Japanese, Germans, Russians, British, or Americans - some of the Allied firebombing campaigns late in the war managed to kill more people in one go than either nuke. Nuking Japan simply sent the message "look, now we can do it with just one bomb."
This was my reaction too. Most of us working in highly technical fields have encountered stunningly beautiful (but nonetheless competent) female engineers. We are also acutely aware of the fact that women in general are very underrepresented in software development. I'm 100% in favor of encouraging more women to pursue technical careers, but in the current environment, my reaction whenever I see an ad like that is to assume it's trying to manipulate lonely male engineers. (Which probably says more about me than the makers of the ad, but the point isn't that the ad is wrong, it's that the backlash is entirely predictable in context.)
I find the Dice ads repulsive, of course, but at least they're acknowledging (and laughing at) the fact that a very large fraction of engineers are hairy, nerdy, not-very-athletic young men. (Also note that it's not considered at all inappropriate to mock hairy, nerdy, not-very-athletic male engineers.)
The goal is freedom in these countries, and China has a great deal of economic freedom for its people now, even if speech is curtailed. . . if we want to crush them, we should encourage massive regulation and redistribution of wealth until they are of little consequence on the world stage, like Europe
Interesting comparison, because for the vast majority of Chinese citizens, while their economic freedom (and condition) is infinitely better than under Mao, it's still much less than in Europe unless you're very well-connected with the CCP. True economic freedom also requires the rule of law (including an independent judiciary), respect for private property rights, a lack of unfair competition from state-owned enterprises, minimal corruption, and accountability for public officials, none of which China has. Sure, you could definitely run a factory much cheaper in China, without having to worry about those pesky regulations concerning pollution or occupational health, and the police are always on hand to brutalize labor organizers. But if you're running, say, Facebook or Google, which market do you think is easier to compete in, Europe or China?
Those are meme attempts to assuage the mass murderous effect of this ban.
The idea that the DDT ban had "mass murderous effects" is itself a meme, and a very recent one, propagated for the specific purpose of discrediting the wider environmental movement and regulations on pollutants. And as the GP made clear, there are very serious practical concerns that are completely ignored by the shills clamoring for widespread DDT use (few of whom had ever expressed concern for the fate of Third World inhabitants until they found a way to blame Rachel Carson).
So basically, she found a 2000 year-old book that says the plant heals malaria, extracted the malaria-healing part and got a Nobel for discovering a malaria drug.
Well, it wasn't a malaria drug before she did the actual science necessary to prove that a 2000-year-old book wasn't simply full of shit, and the end result was many lives saved. I certainly don't begrudge her the Nobel, even though it means we'll spend the next few decades listening to the CCP and alternative medicine practitioners crowing about it. (I can't decide which is worse.)
the fact that it is explicitly mentioned in the citation for the prize is just anecdotal evidence not data
I can't tell, is this a parody troll or not? Here is the exact citation, from the source:
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi mura "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites" and the other half to Youyou Tu "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria"
How can this be made any clearer? Let me guess, this is going to be another one of those threads where a legion of idiots who don't realize that the Peace Prize is selected and awarded by an entirely different institution using different criteria make irrelevant comments about Obama's prize.
Patents on formulations are like any other patent. Again, the issue you're missing is one of testing: a company can claim that it has equivalent packaging, but how do you prove that it really is equivalent? Keep in mind that a large part of FDA approval means "approval to market this drug for specific conditions", or for a generic, "approval to market this formulation as a generic substitute for the previously FDA-approved formulation", and companies get busted (too frequently) when they make claims that aren't FDA-approved. Also, from Wikipedia:
As with new drug substances and dosage forms thereof, novel excipients themselves can be patented; sometimes, however, a particular formulation involving them is kept as a trade secret instead (if not easily reverse-engineered).
And even if the formulation isn't a trade secret, the precise manufacturing processes involved might well be.
If the patent has expired why can't they make it exactly the same as the original manufactuer?
Those pills are much more complicated than you think - the basic molecule may be the same, but the packaging can have a huge effect, which is how "extended release" drugs work. It's what makes extremely powerful recreational drugs like opiates and stimulants into milder prescribed pills like Oxycontin and Adderall. (And in both cases, if you crush them and snort the pills, it totally bypasses the packaging that was put there to prevent you getting high as a kite.) It does actually require some trial and error to get it right and occasionally the generics really aren't as good, just because of the way they're absorbed. So the only way to prove that they're the same is to run actual clinical trials.
FDA approval is a huge barrier to market, and any generic drug company wanting to get FDA approval to sell their pills in the USA needs to demonstrate that they are "biosimilar", which actually requires a lot of clinical testing. (I don't think this is a uniquely American thing, but I'm not sure what the Europeans or Japanese do.) It's much less expensive than the Phase I-III trials required for new drug approvals, but for drugs like this one that are low-demand, the testing just isn't worth it. That's a big reason why the orphan drug regulations were put in place, to encourage companies to conduct these trials for old drugs that had been repurposed.
(PS. I'm neutral on whether we have too much regulation; on balance I think the FDA is a good idea but will scale poorly in the future. However, I don't think we're being unreasonable asking generics manufacturers to demonstrate that their pills are a valid substitute for the existing FDA-approved drug.)
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with your country? They have a nation wide exclusive on a half century old drug with the freedom to set any price they want??? Sanctioned by the Fda?
I forget the exact background, but there was originally a sensible reason for the "orphan drug" regulations - the FDA are trying to ensure a stable supply of relatively rare drugs like this one, which may not be particularly profitable to make, so they offer limited exclusivity (which effectively means "they allow the company to sell the drug at a higher price than would otherwise be the case"). I think there are valid arguments in favor of the overall concept, but like many regulations, it ended up providing perverse incentives for corporate raiders. In this particular case, I think the fact that it's "closed distribution" is what's really indefensible, since it makes generics testing impossible.
This loophole should be fixed, but given the dysfunctional state of the Congress any bill fixing this will probably be encumbered with a prohibition on abortions and more NSA spying.
Eh, I think this case may be outrageous enough to get them to close this particular loophole, and here's why: it's an indefensible perverse incentive, Big Pharma doesn't need it, and the last thing the lobby wants is for politicians to be talking about drug prices in general. Right now their stock prices are falling because of Clinton's comment, and most people working in biotech or pharma think Shkreli is an asshole* and would happily feed him to the wolves anyway. What they need is a very targeted bill that prevents this particular abuse but doesn't touch any other part of the wider industry's business model. I think they could get broad bipartisan support for this - it's the kind of no-brainer that allows politicians to take credit for something without having to address real-world problems.
(* Most of us have scientific backgrounds, and Shkreli is exactly the kind of humanities-major business-weasel we've despised since college. Actually, worse, because most econ majors don't eventually stalk the families of former employees. No one else will cry when his BMW is repossessed.)
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inexpensive drugs you take a few times and then are done with
For most conditions these are simply a fantasy. There are very few true "cures" in medicine, only varying degrees of palliatives. The idea that we'd all be living cancer-free to 150 years if only Big Pharma would focus on real cures is absolute nonsense, because it's extraordinarily difficult to make a drug that magically eradicates all traces of an ailment without severely damaging the host. People who think otherwise need to take a few biology courses.
Because drugs have been patented and sold for obscene piles of money, the regulatory environment has "stepped up their game," in requiring newer drugs to prove their safety and efficacy with obscenely expensive testing protocols before coming to market.
The failure rate for Phase III clinical trials is somewhere between 25% and 50% - i.e. over half of the drugs that make it through Phases I and II are still not effective enough for regulatory approval. We can therefore reasonably assume that if we get rid of Phase III trials altogether to save Big Pharma some money, half of all new drugs will actually be useless. (Except it'll probably be even worse, because without the risk of Phase III failures - which are the worst nightmare of any sane pharma CEO - they will have less incentive to discard more marginal candidates.)
But instead they spend money at cheap, incremental development
Except they don't. Big Pharma has sunk billions of dollars into developing drugs for Alzheimer's, which currently has no truly effective treatments, meaning they have to start from scratch. The failure rate is simply abysmal, so of course we're not seeing those drugs, but it's not for lack of effort.
I only whine when the Feds do all the work, on our dime, yet we end up with a drug company getting all the profits.
This is rarely the case - only 25% of new drugs originate in (presumably federally-funded) academic labs, and even those have to go through a lengthy development process mostly paid for by companies.
The reason it is so profitable for companies to continue to sell old antibiotics is that the research and marketing is largely done. It' s pure profit with no additional investment. And there is no competition because they are protected by long patent terms.
I think the patent term is only 17 years or so - and pharmaceuticals tend to have a lengthy approval process, so it ends up being shorter. Basically anything invented in the mid-1990s or earlier is off-patent (with the caveat that use for specific indications may still be patented, but this doesn't prevent doctors from prescribing it "off-label"). Viagra, for instance, was introduced in 1998 and is now generic in much of the world, and you can get off-label generics in the US even though the patent applying to erectile dysfunction lasts until 2019. So, no, "old" antibiotics are not protected by long patent terms.
Bullshit. Big Pharma regurgitates generics and those that fall out of patentville. The real research is done by universities around the world.
Only about 25% of new drugs start in university labs; the rest are developed by Big Pharma - or, frequently, the smaller companies they keep buying.
We've never observed evolution yet
Wrong
some scientists only assume it from observed differences in the fossil record.
Not "assume", "infer", and anyway decades of molecular biology, genetics, and genomics have proven at least as useful as fossils. My favorite example here.
The worst example in the article: "the discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." This is just fantasy. The wool industry did indeed perform such research many decades ago (just as the pharma industry uses crystallography to design better drugs), but the technique itself was developed entirely by (mostly British and German) academics working over many decades. Companies have had a very important role in developing the hardware used in these experiments, but the research directions have mostly tended to be driven by academia, with industry looking on from the sidelines. (Not that there's anything wrong with this: drug development is already slow and expensive.)
Another counter-example that he couldn't be bothered to mention: the CRISPr-CAS system, discovered accidentally by academics interested in bacterial immunity, and probably the most powerful new molecular biology technique of this century so far. Of course there's no reason why industry couldn't fund this research, but it's an esoteric scientific field that probably didn't seem very important or commercially valuable to anyone until this particular system was discovered. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries come from stumbling around blindly in the dark, something that commercial enterprises are usually poorly suited for.
the current "war on police" means no more traffic enforcement
Pulling over all of the black drivers does not count as "traffic enforcement".
traffic optimization *is* hard
Veering off on a tangent here - is there a good introduction to this subject suitable for an advanced newcomer? I've been curious about this ever since I started driving on California freeways regularly in the last few years, and realized how poorly optimized many of the interchanges are for actual humans. (Anyone who has ever driven past Emeryville will know what I'm talking about.) I always pictured it as some kind of particle dynamics problem, except the particles are irrational, rage-filled morons.
University research has been corporate-funded for decades.
I don't know what other fields are like, but for biomedical research this is absolutely wrong. I worked for both public and private universities in the US for 15 years and the vast majority of scientists were getting the vast majority of their funding from the NIH, or maybe the NSF, plus a few big private foundations like HHMI. Funding from companies was not uncommon - in fact it paid my salary for a couple of years, thank you tech transfer department* - but for most researchers it was a fraction of whatever the government was giving them. (In the group where I was paid by corporate money, I was the only one, while another dozen people were paid by an NIH grant.)
(* actually, no. Working with companies as an academic can be an incredible pain in the ass and I didn't like our licensing policies anyway. And it certainly did skew our priorities somewhat, which was even more annoying. But we absolutely didn't need the money either.)
instead rely on a fairly complex set of heuristics from clinical experience, lengthy education, and a good understanding of underlying normal and abnormal physiology.
See, that's part of the problem... I went to school with pre-meds, I had to teach pre-meds, and as a scientist I am well-acquainted with the frailty of human reasoning, so the idea of my medical issues being subject to some doctor's "heuristics" is a little terrifying. (Not that I'm eager for every hypochondriac with an internet connection and access to cheap lab testing to start self-diagnosing, of course.)
sorry if this sounds confusing but it's not easy to speak techcrunch'y when you're not a native english speaker like me
Dude, I'm a native English speaker and I'm a software developer working in Silicon Valley, and I can't speak TechCrunchese either, nor can most of my coworkers for that matter. Your version sounds about right though. I think the people who are really fluent in it must take classes in college or something. (Or maybe this is what Stanford fraternity membership gets you?)
it tips over from looking like "impressive board" to weird and kind of suspicious
I saw it described as "The Illuminati" on another message board. Personally, I automatically distrust anything associated with Kissinger - in a decent and just world, he'd be serving out a life sentence.
It means if we ever did see another Great War style conflict no nation, even the other large nuclear powers, can threaten our home land.
That was actually an important motivation of many of the scientists who promoted nuclear research in the 1920s and 1930s - they'd just witnessed a devastating war of attrition, and thought that nuclear weapons would not only make this kind of war obsolete, they'd make the entire concept of war between nuclear-armed nations unthinkable. It's important to remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, by themselves, no worse than any number of other atrocities committed by the Japanese, Germans, Russians, British, or Americans - some of the Allied firebombing campaigns late in the war managed to kill more people in one go than either nuke. Nuking Japan simply sent the message "look, now we can do it with just one bomb."
This was my reaction too. Most of us working in highly technical fields have encountered stunningly beautiful (but nonetheless competent) female engineers. We are also acutely aware of the fact that women in general are very underrepresented in software development. I'm 100% in favor of encouraging more women to pursue technical careers, but in the current environment, my reaction whenever I see an ad like that is to assume it's trying to manipulate lonely male engineers. (Which probably says more about me than the makers of the ad, but the point isn't that the ad is wrong, it's that the backlash is entirely predictable in context.)
I find the Dice ads repulsive, of course, but at least they're acknowledging (and laughing at) the fact that a very large fraction of engineers are hairy, nerdy, not-very-athletic young men. (Also note that it's not considered at all inappropriate to mock hairy, nerdy, not-very-athletic male engineers.)
The goal is freedom in these countries, and China has a great deal of economic freedom for its people now, even if speech is curtailed. . . if we want to crush them, we should encourage massive regulation and redistribution of wealth until they are of little consequence on the world stage, like Europe
Interesting comparison, because for the vast majority of Chinese citizens, while their economic freedom (and condition) is infinitely better than under Mao, it's still much less than in Europe unless you're very well-connected with the CCP. True economic freedom also requires the rule of law (including an independent judiciary), respect for private property rights, a lack of unfair competition from state-owned enterprises, minimal corruption, and accountability for public officials, none of which China has. Sure, you could definitely run a factory much cheaper in China, without having to worry about those pesky regulations concerning pollution or occupational health, and the police are always on hand to brutalize labor organizers. But if you're running, say, Facebook or Google, which market do you think is easier to compete in, Europe or China?
Those are meme attempts to assuage the mass murderous effect of this ban.
The idea that the DDT ban had "mass murderous effects" is itself a meme, and a very recent one, propagated for the specific purpose of discrediting the wider environmental movement and regulations on pollutants. And as the GP made clear, there are very serious practical concerns that are completely ignored by the shills clamoring for widespread DDT use (few of whom had ever expressed concern for the fate of Third World inhabitants until they found a way to blame Rachel Carson).
So basically, she found a 2000 year-old book that says the plant heals malaria, extracted the malaria-healing part and got a Nobel for discovering a malaria drug.
Well, it wasn't a malaria drug before she did the actual science necessary to prove that a 2000-year-old book wasn't simply full of shit, and the end result was many lives saved. I certainly don't begrudge her the Nobel, even though it means we'll spend the next few decades listening to the CCP and alternative medicine practitioners crowing about it. (I can't decide which is worse.)
the fact that it is explicitly mentioned in the citation for the prize is just anecdotal evidence not data
I can't tell, is this a parody troll or not? Here is the exact citation, from the source:
How can this be made any clearer? Let me guess, this is going to be another one of those threads where a legion of idiots who don't realize that the Peace Prize is selected and awarded by an entirely different institution using different criteria make irrelevant comments about Obama's prize.
Patents on formulations are like any other patent. Again, the issue you're missing is one of testing: a company can claim that it has equivalent packaging, but how do you prove that it really is equivalent? Keep in mind that a large part of FDA approval means "approval to market this drug for specific conditions", or for a generic, "approval to market this formulation as a generic substitute for the previously FDA-approved formulation", and companies get busted (too frequently) when they make claims that aren't FDA-approved. Also, from Wikipedia:
And even if the formulation isn't a trade secret, the precise manufacturing processes involved might well be.
If the patent has expired why can't they make it exactly the same as the original manufactuer?
Those pills are much more complicated than you think - the basic molecule may be the same, but the packaging can have a huge effect, which is how "extended release" drugs work. It's what makes extremely powerful recreational drugs like opiates and stimulants into milder prescribed pills like Oxycontin and Adderall. (And in both cases, if you crush them and snort the pills, it totally bypasses the packaging that was put there to prevent you getting high as a kite.) It does actually require some trial and error to get it right and occasionally the generics really aren't as good, just because of the way they're absorbed. So the only way to prove that they're the same is to run actual clinical trials.
FDA approval is a huge barrier to market, and any generic drug company wanting to get FDA approval to sell their pills in the USA needs to demonstrate that they are "biosimilar", which actually requires a lot of clinical testing. (I don't think this is a uniquely American thing, but I'm not sure what the Europeans or Japanese do.) It's much less expensive than the Phase I-III trials required for new drug approvals, but for drugs like this one that are low-demand, the testing just isn't worth it. That's a big reason why the orphan drug regulations were put in place, to encourage companies to conduct these trials for old drugs that had been repurposed.
(PS. I'm neutral on whether we have too much regulation; on balance I think the FDA is a good idea but will scale poorly in the future. However, I don't think we're being unreasonable asking generics manufacturers to demonstrate that their pills are a valid substitute for the existing FDA-approved drug.)
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with your country? They have a nation wide exclusive on a half century old drug with the freedom to set any price they want??? Sanctioned by the Fda?
I forget the exact background, but there was originally a sensible reason for the "orphan drug" regulations - the FDA are trying to ensure a stable supply of relatively rare drugs like this one, which may not be particularly profitable to make, so they offer limited exclusivity (which effectively means "they allow the company to sell the drug at a higher price than would otherwise be the case"). I think there are valid arguments in favor of the overall concept, but like many regulations, it ended up providing perverse incentives for corporate raiders. In this particular case, I think the fact that it's "closed distribution" is what's really indefensible, since it makes generics testing impossible.
This loophole should be fixed, but given the dysfunctional state of the Congress any bill fixing this will probably be encumbered with a prohibition on abortions and more NSA spying.
Eh, I think this case may be outrageous enough to get them to close this particular loophole, and here's why: it's an indefensible perverse incentive, Big Pharma doesn't need it, and the last thing the lobby wants is for politicians to be talking about drug prices in general. Right now their stock prices are falling because of Clinton's comment, and most people working in biotech or pharma think Shkreli is an asshole* and would happily feed him to the wolves anyway. What they need is a very targeted bill that prevents this particular abuse but doesn't touch any other part of the wider industry's business model. I think they could get broad bipartisan support for this - it's the kind of no-brainer that allows politicians to take credit for something without having to address real-world problems.
(* Most of us have scientific backgrounds, and Shkreli is exactly the kind of humanities-major business-weasel we've despised since college. Actually, worse, because most econ majors don't eventually stalk the families of former employees. No one else will cry when his BMW is repossessed.)