Big Pharma: The Face of American Capitalism

Smirking Shkreli

The smirking visage of Martin Shkreli personified the face of American capitalism as most doctors see it every day. 

Drug companies and health insurance companies have one thing in common: They do not exist to make people healthier; they exist to maximize return for their stockholders. 

All the advertising about how much Blue Cross cares about the health of its customers or how Pfizer does God's work on earth notwithstanding, the folks who occupy the CEO suites at these companies are not concerned with humanity but with money.

As Mr. Sanders noted in the debate, American drug companies can raise your drug costs by 1000% and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

In fact, American doctors see this every day. The company which holds the patent on the drug which kills hepatitis C, which could cure the 5 million patients in this country whose lives will be shortened or made miserable by hepatitis C will charge each of these unfortunates $80,000 for the course of therapy, for a couple of dozen pills. When asked to justify this cost, the company replied that a liver transplant would cost even more, so that's how they set the price. 

In a capitalist society, with patent laws, a company without a conscience can and often does do this sort of thing. They usually try to claim the cost of the drug reflects all the millions of dollars spent in the research and complying with  regulations it took to bring the drug to market,  but this is a manifestly specious argument,  exposed in any number of ways by all sorts of different analyses. Simply put, it's a lie. If research and development were so costly, then it would be part of overhead and net profits at drug companies would be modest; but drug companies make billions and the profit margins are huge.

Mr. Shkreli, to his credit, has not tried to claim the cost of the drug he raised from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars a pill was inflated by research costs. He could hardly claim that, because the drug in question had been developed years earlier and all the R&D costs paid.   Shkrei simply bought the rights and then raised the price, as is his right in our current health care system. 

He couldn't have done this in the United Kingdom, in France or Germany or Spain or Sweden or Norway or Denmark or Finland or anywhere else on the planet except maybe Somalia, but then again, as the Republicans are always telling us, that's what American exceptional ism means.