Pharmaceutical Madness

Hi everyone,

I'm sure some of you have heard the controversy over Turing Pharmaceuticals. For those who haven't a drug used among AIDS patients for toxoplasmosis experienced a hike in price from 13.50 a dose to 750. That's right, guys, seven hundred and fifty dollars for one pill.

What winds up happening is that because there is no umbrella committee in place to regulate pricing, companies, particularly those which serve a niche market and have no competitors, can set prices as high as they want to, knowing there isn't much to be done about it. And here's a surprise, this has been the case for ages. However, it's not like this was a new cutting-edge drug, either -- the drug that now costs 750 dollars has been around for 62 years. In cases of generics, it tends to be a shortage of materials or dropout of competitors that causes costs to rise, since those are not subject to patents and can be openly mass-produced and sold, rather than the whimsy of the manufacturing company.

What are we to take away from this? Sure, businesses such as GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, and others have a right to make their own prices, but at some point it becomes absurd. Health has really been a commodity since the introduction of Health Maintenance Organizations in the seventies, and we continue to go further and further down the rabbit's hole during the 21st century.  Dr. Carlos Del Rio, chairman of the Department of Global Health at Emory's School of Public Health said, "This is totally a policy issue. It's a policy that Congress can change. We can change it by calling the moral argument, but not the legal argument." And herein lies the problem. Are we to pressure Congress to place limits or to institute a regulating body? How well would such attempts go over in the context of a country whose number one lobbying agent is, in fact, Big Pharma? Demanding people to pay the amount they do out of pocket for their medications is bordering on highway robbery, our insurance means less and less, and executives are probably getting richer. When did this start, who are the actors in this, and how are we going to put an end to it?