Capitalism? "Pharma chief defends 400% drug price rise as a ‘moral requirement’"

“We have to make money when we can.”

Second, while drug companies complain they need higher drug prices for research and development, they’ve actually cut back on introducing new drugs for an easier solution to make money; buy old generics and jack their prices sky high:

There’s a general feeling in drug development that manufacturers are entitled to recoup the cost of developing a drug, widely held to be about 10 to 15 years of employee time and about $1 billion. Manufacturers’ inability to earn those sums back has been one justification for companies leaving the market.

Setting aside the fact that taxpayers and the National Institute of Health developed many of our most important drugs, let’s focus on big pharma’s exploitation of human suffering for profit and shareholder happiness:

A HANDFUL OF years ago, a small pharmaceutical company quietly acquired the rights to an old 65-year-old generic antibiotic. New owner Nostrum Laboratories… abruptly raised the price more than 400 percent - $474.75 to $2,392. Nitrofurantoin … is precious to the 6 to 8 million Americans who get urinary tract infections … a liquid, used for children, elderly patients, and anyone who can’t swallow a pill.

Company CEO Nirman Mulye, telling the Financial Times, “We have to make money when we can. I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can. My exact words to the guy was, ‘Listen I don’t have a moral obligation to breathe and eat, but if I don’t do those things I’ll die. It’s common sense that if a business doesn’t make profit or at least break even it’s not going to be able to stay in business, right? American jobs will be lost.”

Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and vice-provost at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that case somewhat flippantly in The New York Times in 2015. “As a society we seem willing to pay $100,000 or more for cancer drugs that cure no one and at best add weeks or a few months to life. We are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for knee surgery that, at best, improves function but is not lifesaving,” he wrote. “So why won’t we pay $10,000 for a lifesaving antibiotic?”

The answers to that question have been: No, we shouldn’t raise antibiotic prices, because other drugs are overpriced already, or No, because poor countries who already struggle to buy enough antibiotics won’t be able to afford them at all.