This is a clear violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act (USC 15), and should be prosecuted as such.
Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
341–350 of 461 posts
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the loophole though, the quantities are so small that realistically, no pharmaceutical company has the incentive to make their version of the drug, even at $750 per dose. There are still costs to making a drug that's off-patent, and sometimes the number of patients being treated is only in the double digits. Additionally, a competing drug released at say, $500 per dose would still be considered predatory anywa…
Even though it's $750 per dose now, since they have exclusive control over the market they could decrease it to whatever whenever they wanted to starve competitors.. probably after said competitors have invested in doing it.
Buyers don't have to just go on price. They can take past behaviour into account. They could justify this in the name of ensuring continuing supply at a reasonable price.
So, even if this company does always price their product at less than the new generics they've probably lost the trust of the buyers.
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#343I am a fund manager and I have followed Martin Shkreli since his prior company, Retrophin, went public about two years ago. Simply put, Martin is a sociopathic criminal with a well-established, and consistent track record of deceit, recklessness, failure, and just plain old stupidity. But he is also hyper-aggressive. He is currently living in Switzerland, and it's my understanding that he fled the country in order to…
I don't know who you are, but my reaction is that a comment like this shouldn't be stated in the exact tone you've chosen/reacted with. (I looked through your past few comments, and a lot of them are the same way - "There is no shortage of scammy software companies like AVG, but what always cracked me up about AVG was their logo.") I like the fact that HN is a particularly civil place - it's in the guidelines. Now gr…
I didn't downvote but I do disagree with you. It's a blunt opinion, but one supported by reference to the article and to the cited litigation, from someone with meaningful perspective as a professional investor - in the same way I'd be OK with a professional crypto researcher saying 'Product X is blatantly insecure, and Software Company Y is dishonest when it claims otherwise,' or any number of other contexts.
I'm with you on thinking one should be diplomatic most of the time absent full possession of the facts, but I don't think one should hedge one's personal experience as long as its appropriately qualified. In this case I saw an unusually blunt opinion, but one formed with additional information that I don't have access to. I don't take the opinion at face value, but it expands the scope of the discussion with additional data rather than being purely a reaction to the NYT article, not least because the author of the opinion is signaling a willingness to risk reputational damage by making such blunt statements.
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#344Interview with Shkreli about this price increase: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-21/why-turing-i...
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
caseysoftware's argument is not that they're trying to lure a competitor into the market, but rather the threat that, upon spending all the money to reverse-engineer the drug and enter the market, the incumbent could drop its price to $20/dose and the new entrant would be stranded with no way to recover their NRE costs in an economically relevant timeframe. Both companies might be profitable on a marginal cost basis…
There is no need to reverse-engineer the drug, as its under an expired patent—so all of the processes and techniques used are open and theoretically (if the patent office has done its job right) should be easy for a competitor to reproduce. this is in fact one of the stated goals of the patent system: a limited monopoly in exchange for the advancement of public knowledge.
I was thinking less of the reverse-engineering costs and more of the hard production costs. Equipment, personnel, production time, etc. Those are non-trivial costs even if the complete formula and process is known.
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#346I am a fund manager and I have followed Martin Shkreli since his prior company, Retrophin, went public about two years ago. Simply put, Martin is a sociopathic criminal with a well-established, and consistent track record of deceit, recklessness, failure, and just plain old stupidity. But he is also hyper-aggressive. He is currently living in Switzerland, and it's my understanding that he fled the country in order to…
Isn't this one of those very few cases were nationalisation of a company is called for?
When a private actor is exploiting a flaw in the regulatory system, it might be easier to fix that flow or strengthen other parts of the regulatory system (eg perhaps there are remedies in antitrust law), rather than impinging on a property interest because we don't like the outcome.
Here the problem is that other manufacturers can't take up making these drugs at a sensible price because they have to get FDA approval for their copies, and doing that requires test comparisons with the original drug which you propose to copy to ensure that they behave identically. So either we need to change that requirement to a different testing approach (eg proving your copy is good through chemical assay rather than in a clinical trial) or by making licensing contingent on cooperation with regulatory priorities (so if you want to sell your off-patent drug, you have to make samples available to would-be competitors or provide the FDA with samples on request and at cost).
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an economic and policy perspective, unfortunately, Turing is doing everything right. This is an economically misguided point of view. Free market decision-making can only be argued to be optimal in a free market system, which pharma is not, a distinction which the decision-makers certainly were intelligent enough to understand. Free market mechanisms either need to be put in place, or we need to stop allowing it…
The problem is that the economic system that not only allows this, but incentivizes it. Witch hunting isn't going to fix a fundamentally broken economic system. We need to admit that our system is not optimal, and fix it. Rational people are always going to act in their own best self-interest.
I agreed with you up to the last sentence. I see no reason to call rational only wholly selfish behaviour.
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#348Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#349Interview with Shkreli about this price increase: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-21/why-turing-i...
I encourage everyone to watch this...maybe it's all bs but among the interesting points Shkreli says:
-They have reduced or eliminated co-pays so no patient is paying as much out of pocket as they used to
-The drug is still 50% given away to people who cannot afford it
-The company ships drugs to patients before resolving disputes with insurance providers
-Shkreli's view is that it is in the best long term interests of the public to have a drug that can be insanely profitable be insanely profitable because it creates an incentive to create another better drug
-On that line, the company is researching new alternatives to the drug which are less toxic (ie: cannabalizing its own market)
Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit of a fantasy, isn't it? Pharma companies don't re-invent the same wheel: even in cases where they're pursuing similar avenues of research, the drugs being developed share sometimes significant differences (and in many cases, even insignificant differences can later be found to be more significant than first believed). Even if companies were somehow able to collaborate without any problem, the end result…
Every way of dealing with something has its flaws, the point is to fix them. The patent system is flawed in its foundation, i.e. claiming a discovery for yourself and keeping this technology away from the rest of humanity. For the rest, I wouldn't know why there wouldn't be multiple medicines. Labs would still come up with multiple compounds that have more or less the same result, and if not, research would continue…
That's a nice worldview, but it is predicated on the assumption that people are basically good, as suggested by Rousseau. Many of us adhere to a more gloomy philosophy as suggested by Hobbes, that people are more likely than not to be selfish assholes given the opportunity (as demonstrated by the subject of the story). From a game-theoretic point of view, you need a strategy for dealing with defectors, just as in nature plants and animals need to evolve responses to parasitism or suffer the consequences. Symbiotic/cooperative mechanisms which are mutually beneficial can emerge in nature and in markets, but it's by no means a sure thing that they will in any given instance.