Greed and the necessity for regulation

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.