Greed and the necessity for regulation
The story of U.S. drug pricing run amok isn’t just about corporate arrogance and avarice—it is also about government permissiveness and inaction
On December 1, 2015, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee issued a scathing investigative report concluding that Gilead Sciences strategically priced its curative hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatments Sovaldi and Harvoni to yield an immediate financial windfall for the company, ignoring evidence and expert opinion that doing so would bust the budgets of public and private insurers and, consequently, prevent the medications from becoming available to all who need them. In February, Valeant Pharmaceuticals Limited and Turing Pharmaceuticals stood before members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which conducted its own investigations into the sudden, inexplicable price increases for a number of lifesaving drugs. A month later, Turing executives were back on Capitol Hill, this time in front of irate members of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.
With the surge in narratives of scandalous corporate greed and villainy, the pharmaceutical industry’s drug pricing practices are now firmly entrenched in American political discourse. The real scandal, however, is that monopolistic drug pricing is completely legal in the United States. Political condemnation of the pharmaceutical industry for its fleecing of consumers can feel vindicating, but it is also specious and hypocritical in the face of long-standing governmental encouragement of profit-driven private-sector practices, even when they have very real consequences for public health. CEOs like Martin Shkreli of Turing know this and, indeed, fully and unapologetically inhabit this system.
Unless the recent public cries of outrage are addressed by stricter government regulations and the possibility of bona fide price controls, exploitive drug pricing practices can be expected to continue.
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Source: TAGline Spring 2016
