Why we need a national health care system -- people's health should not be hostage to profiteers

To start with, a national health care service -- like expanding Medicare to cover everyone -- would eliminate much of the administrative costs and bring health care costs down.   But that's an old story.    Here is the latest outrage, having to do with profiteering on the lives of sick people.

Story compiled by Dartagnon of Daily Kos:
There is a life-threatening parasitic infection, for which there is an effective, standard treatment, a 62 year old drug called Daraprim.   It used to cost $13.50 per tablet.   Yes, that's pretty expensive to start with.

But then in August, a former hedge-fund manager bought up the rights to the drug for a start-up drug company.   He immediately raised the price of a tablet from $13.50 to $750.00 per tablet.

That adds up to an annual cost for the treatment to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  What's the justification?    The drug has been in use for 62 years.   No added costs involved.  Martin Shkreli, the new owner of this company just raised the price because he can.

That's what happens when you turn over what should be in the hands of humanitarians -- health care -- to people whose only motive is profit.   Mr. Shkreli has previously tried to manipulate the price of drugs by lobbying the FDA not to approve drugs made by companies whose stock he was trying to influence.  He has acknowledged that his company stands to earn tens or even hundreds of millions from the increased price of Daraprim.

Daraprin is primarily used to treat malaria, as well as toxoplasmosis, a secondary parasite that often infects the brains of people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients.   It's not just that treatment costs for those patients will be affected;   insurance companies that have to pay the bills will increase their premiums on everyone.

The Daily Kos article continues:

"Ultimately, the problem really isn't Mr. Shkreli.  He's just a shark doing what sharks do. The problem is that when vital drug treatments and health care are consigned to the whims of the "free market," people like Shkreli are equally free to charge whatever they want to vulnerable patients by claiming, as here, that the distribution is small enough to warrant "specialty status" for such drugs." 

Shkreli claims that the higher cost is necessary for his company to develop new and better treatments.   Infectious disease specialists disagreed.   Daraprim is effective, side effects are manageable, and there is no crying need for newer treatment.

And my argument is that, even if there were a need, why should current patients bear the costs of research for new drugs?   Isn't that a public health problem that should be addressed by government?

Ralph