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from the business-being-good-to-the-common-man dept.
Discussion from a September SoylentNews article.
From the Chicago Tribune:
Stepping into the furor over eye-popping price spikes for old generic medicines, a maker of compounded drugs will begin selling $1 doses of Daraprim, whose price recently was jacked up to $750 per pill by Turing Pharmaceuticals.
San Diego-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals Inc., which mixes approved drug ingredients to fill individual patient prescriptions, said Thursday it will supply capsules containing Daraprim's active ingredients, pyrimethamine and leucovorin, for $99 for a 100-capsule bottle, via its website.
The 3 1/2-year-old drug compounding firm also plans to start making inexpensive versions of other generic drugs whose prices have skyrocketed, Chief Executive Mark Baum told The Associated Press.
"We are looking at all of these cases where the sole-source generic companies are jacking the price way up," Baum said in an interview. "There'll be many more of these" compounded drugs coming in the near future.
The high price of prescription medicines in the U.S. — from drugs for cancer and rare diseases that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year down to once-cheap generic drugs now costing many times their old price — has become a hot issue in the 2016 presidential race.
News that Turing, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and other drugmakers have bought rights to old, cheap medicines that are the only treatment for serious diseases and then hiked prices severalfold has angered patients. It's triggered government investigations, politicians' proposals to fight "price gouging," heavy media scrutiny and a big slump in biotech stock prices.
Well, that certainly didn't take long. At $99/100 pills, I expect the profits are slim indeed - but there is probably a profit. The company certainly can't afford to just give the stuff away.
So - if one company can show a profit at $1/pill, how in hell does anyone justify selling the pill for hundreds of dollars?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @09:48AM
Well, the requirement to test your pills is good. So the right fix would be to make sure that those who are required to test are also able to test.
If you want to sell a new drug, just as you have requirement to test your drug, you should also have a requirement of providing samples to anyone wanting to do tests, and lose your permission to sell your drug if you refuse to sell test samples.