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Leading drug companies including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan conspired to inflate the prices of generic drugs by as much as 1,000 percent, according to a far-reaching lawsuit filed on Friday by 44 states.
The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, according to the complaint, including lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for A.D.H.D.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants.
"We all know that prescription drugs can be expensive," Gurbir S. Grewal, the New Jersey attorney general, said in a statement. "Now we know that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic drug companies to inflate their prices."
In court documents, the state prosecutors lay out a brazen price-fixing scheme involving more than a dozen generic drug companies and just as many executives responsible for sales, marketing and pricing. The complaint alleges that the conspirators knew their efforts to thwart competition were illegal and that they therefore avoided written records by coordinating instead at industry meals, parties, golf outings and other networking events.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 13 2019, @01:39PM (4 children)
We've had a number of bank collapses, yet we still have banks. There are other fixes to bad banks than regulation. Bankruptcy is one such fix.
Well, regulation itself is often a big part of the problem, such as when regulation is sufficiently onerous that one has to break it in order to function (naturally leading to the above corruption) or when regulation is so complex that one can't understand the regulation that one's activities are subject to. Ignorance is no excuse, right?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 13 2019, @01:52PM
I think that problem goes right back to, who has the money to buy politicians. Multiple special interests can each buy their own politicians, to ram this or that through legislation. No surprise then, that you can have mutually contradictory regulations governing the same business. Politics - where everyone compromises everything, if there's a dollar to be had. Funny that we never seem to investigate congress for corruption, isn't it?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday May 13 2019, @02:31PM (2 children)
Sports must have rules and officiating. The officiating must not be corrupt. Take those away and the sport, no matter what it is, breaks down.
If there weren't rules and laws against it, why shouldn't players simply try to murder or sabotage the competition? You know, like Tonya Harding did Nancy Kerrigan?
Civil society needs rules and enforcement too. How'd it be if WalMart and KMart employees started shooting each other? And tried to intimidate the other's customers, shoot them too? You're just minding your own business, walking into a WalMart store, when a KMart sniper murders you as an example to your fellow WalMart shoppers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday May 13 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
That's both a valid point and a counter example.
It's a counter example because when kids are playing for fun, then they officials are a hindrance, and the rules are informal. As they get more serious about winning, the conditions change. Generally team sports are played so seriously by the time that one is in junior high school that both rules and officials are necessary. But often adults can play without need for officials, and with agreed variants of rules. In my family we agreed that one can look up words before playing them in Scrabble, even though that's explicitly against the official rules. And note that no official was involved. At my college dorm we had two variations of hearts, in one of which the first card played was always the two of clubs, and in the other it was whatever was lead by the player to the left of the dealer, but couldn't be a heart. Don't try this at a Casino game.
Now in business the desire to win is so strong that even with firm rules and officials and the existence of formal penalties, players frequently break the rules. Many of them don't seem to feel either guilty or ashamed of doing so, only of getting caught.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 14 2019, @12:55AM
It depends on the stakes. For low stakes games, sure, informality works.
But when the stakes are high and there are enough participants that not everyone knows everyone else, the money grubbers come out of the woodwork. They're going to work every angle they can think of to win those big bucks. Psych out the opposition, and mangle the rules and trample the spirit without quite breaking the letter. I played in a big money chess tournament just once. Before the game started, my first opponent let me know he was actually a much stronger player than his rating would suggest, because he purposely threw his last 20 games to get his rating under the limit. Sounded proud of his cleverness in working the system in that way. He was probably trying to scare me too. While such sandbagging is not technically cheating, it certainly is unethical. Of course some will outright cheat if they can figure a way to do it with good odds of going undetected. My next opponent provided an inaccurate clock, giving me the side that ran faster so I would have less time. Now that one is cheating, but this was the days of mechanical clocks, and some inaccuracy had to be allowed. Couldn't do anything about that one either, as I had no clock of my own. I've seen the same kind of crap in other games whenever there was significant prize money.
Cheating also happens when it is very easy to do. Play chess online, and it won't be long before you run into an opponent who is using a strong computer chess engine to make their moves for them.