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In a nutshell, this is why I feel privatizing the healthcare industry is dangerous and borderline immoral as this case demonstrates:
A hedge fund manager bought a company that produces a life-saving drug. The drug has been around for 62 years and sold for $13.50 per pill. This guy raised the price of the drug to .............. ready for it?...........$750.00 per pill!
Can you imagine that?
Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Last edited by Just Fred (9/21/2015 9:38 am)
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And there's more .................... as an aside, you give 'em hell, Bernie!
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May they be cursed to irony.
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I've noticed the cost of both of my prescriptions increased recently but no where near what is quoted above.
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Hillary says she's going to tackle the problem, so biotech stocks take a dive. Market manipulation? A weak sector? Computerized trading?
Nah . . . It's Obamacare and Hillary causing the problems.
Biotech stocks sink after Hillary Clinton 'price gouging' tweet
By Chuck Mikolajczak
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Biotech stocks tumbled on Monday, dampening an early rally on Wall Street, after leading U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted her intent to tackle unnecessarily high prices in some drug markets.
"Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous. Tomorrow I'll lay out a plan to take it on," she tweeted, citing a New York Times article about rapidly rising drug prices.
In the moments following Clinton's tweet at 10:56 a.m. EDT (1456 GMT), shares of many biotech companies turned down sharply.
The Nasdaq biotech index <.NBI>, which had been roughly unchanged on Monday morning, dropped 1 percent in the next half hour, dropping to a session low of 3,535.86 at 1:01 p.m. in New York, just over two hours after Clinton’s post on social network Twitter.
Heading into the last hour of trading, that index was down 4.6 percent, at 3,561.84. In the Nasdaq Composite index <.IXIC>, 25 of the largest point decliners were from the healthcare sector.
Clinton was referring to an article about skyrocketing drug prices, in part caused by pharmaceutical companies adopting a strategy of buying older drugs and turning them into expensive specialty drugs.
Biotechs have been among the better performing stocks, having risen for seven straight years, including a gain of 12 percent for 2015.
They are also extremely volatile, subject to wild swings over shorter time frames and are among the more expensive stocks. The trailing price-to-earnings ratio for the Nasdaq biotech index stands at 28.2, according to Thomson Reuters data, versus 18.37 for the broader S&P 500.
"The one issue overhanging healthcare, the one 'black swan' event on healthcare in general, is real, true drug price controls like you have in Canada, France and the UK," said Sven Borho, founding general partner and fund manager at Orbimed Advisors LLC, in New York.
"Especially when you have headlines like you have today, without a lot of meat on it, then the fantasy goes wild."
After climbing more than 1 percent in the early portion of trading, Wall Street sharply pared gains due to the biotech weakness, with both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 <.SPX> falling to session lows before rebounding modestly.
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Did you happen to read some of Martin Shkreli's (the hedge fund manager turned pharma exec) responses to criticism of his price gouging? He sounds like a spoiled brat, 13 year old kid who got crammed in his locker a lot at school.
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I do not have enough negative words for this smug, smirking adolescent. He thinks he is so clever. It's appalling he is so lacking in empathy and thinks only of himself.