Friday, December 18, 2015

Just deserts for pharmaceutical price gouger

In this photo, Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, exits federal court in New York on Thursday, Dec. 17, 2015.   (Bloomberg via Getty Images)
 
Martin Shkreli is probably one of the most despised men in recent news, other than terrorists or politicians named Trump and Cruz.    The BBC once referred to him as "the most hated man in America."

He is the former hedge fund manager who bought out a pharmaceutical company and promply increased the price of a life-saving drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $700.00 per tablet -- an increase of 5000%.   The drug is used to treat the parasitic infection, toxoplasmosis, which is especially dangerous for HIV/AIDs and cancer patients.  

He further established his pariah status by controversial and taunting remarks on social media -- and by first promising that he would lower the price by 10%, and then not doing so.   But also claiming on Twitter:  "I like to stir the pot, but I would never, ever price a drug beyond a sick person's reach."  He then defended his move as simply "trying to create a profitable drug company." 

The fact is that the drug has been available for 62 years, there are no patent protections in effect nor any research costs to recoup, and independent chemists have said it is a very cheap compound to make.   Perhaps it was his hedge fund debts Shkreli was trying to recoup. 

Ironically, it was not for drug price gouging that he has been indicted.   The charges against him have to do with his hedge fund management, which the U.S. attorney said he "essentially ran . . . like a Ponzi scheme, where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors in the prior company."   He was charged with securities fraud and wire fraud conspiracy, which can carry a jail sentence of up to 20 years.  Bail was set at $5 million.

Perhaps we should pass a law that forbids Ponzi schemers from buying pharmaceutical companies.    Bailing out hedge fund fraudsters by gouging sick people does not seem like the American way to do things.

Ralph

The online Grammarist explains the phrase "just deserts" thus:  The expression meaning that which is deserved was originally just deserts. The phrase is the last refuge of an obsolete meaning of desert—namely, something that is deserved or merited. But because most modern English speakers are unfamiliar with that old sense of desert, the phrase is often understandably written just desserts.

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