Generally, when massive price oddities become commonplace, it's evidence of government distortions of free market operation. Trying to blame it on 'rogue' CEOs is an exercise in futility.
In fact Daraprim/Pyrimethamine shows some interesting features of markets:
* the market in the United States is so small, that there is a single manufacturer
* Generic drug manufacturers try to come in the market, the brand-name holder has made it extremely hard for them to do equivalence testing by making the drug available only through a restricted channel that excludes them.
* Even if them manage to get the drug to the market, the brand-name manufacturer can lower prices temporarily, ensuring they exit.
* The same manufacturer can have doctors prescribe the expensive brand-name versions of the drug by buying them off.
Instead of leaving patients in the hands of such natural or almost natural monopolies, the government can fix this situation in a variety of ways - price ceilings, subsidies, even government production of drugs for rare diseases.
You can argue that, some regulation somewhere has given these companies a monopoly, but without any regulation, there would be no market to speak of - the off-NDA drug market isn't one I and assume most patients trust.
The way around the trust issue is to make the "and effective" part of FDA regulation optional. Drug companies can only market "and effective" if they get the FDA approval of it. The rest can only market it as "safe". This can dramatically reduce the prices of drugs, and it is the user option whether they want to pay extra for the "and effective" certification or not.
It was optional until the 1960s. It was changed to be mandatory because the market was full of safe but useless drugs. Considering how mere differences in marketing requirements have not stopped a flood of useless homeopathic remedies, I expect that useless drugs would come back in force if that change were reversed.
Americans have paid a heavy price for this in terms of large reduction in the number of new pharmaceuticals coming to market, long delays for new cures, and, of course, huge price increases.
See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman.
the government can fix this situation in a variety of ways - price ceilings, subsidies, even government production of drugs for rare diseases.
I'd think they should require cooperation with the equivalence studies, and possibly foot (part of?) the bill for those studies. Try to minimize the downsides of their (overall important and helpful, if perhaps taken a bit too far) regulations that cause the problem.
Price ceilings for anything with a government-granted monopoly would also probably be good, but that's... not exactly the issue here, since the drugs in question have gone off-patent.
And they can only buy it from one place (which doesn't have to compete on price due to being the only one) because... guess what? Government interference.
Sure, but it wouldn't have seatbelts or airbags and the "non-polluting" would come with 2 pages of fine print redefining what pollution is (and it would probably give you cancer).
What if I don't want or can't afford seatbelts or airbags or accident insurance (not to be confused with liability insurance)?
Poor people end up taking that increase in life expectancy and just wasting it on walking and sitting on the bus because it's so expensive to operate a vehicle here in Canada.
It's your mother's place to tell you to wear your seatbelt, not the government's.
The choice might be "buy this or die" but it's the government that makes it "buy this [at exorbitant cost] or die".
In this case, not even due to a patent, but because you can't sell a generic without lengthy, costly FDA approval.
Essentially the government is telling sick people, "you can't take this generic daraprim from India because we haven't approved it, so pay Martin Shkreli $750 a pill or fuck off and die".
It's asinine and it's 100% the government's fault this is happening. If Martin Shkreli hadn't done it, someone else would have.
Shkreli is at fault whether someone else would've done it or not. Someone else didn't do it, Shkreli did. He's responsible for his actions, and the government is responsible for making them possible.
"Food" is not a single commodity, but rather about a million different items which largely substitute for one another when it comes to basic "or die" sustenance. If bananas suddenly cost $100/pound, my choice wouldn't be to pay $100/pound or die, I'd simply stop buying bananas, and buy more of other food instead.
Drugs are not comparable, because there's typically only a handful of drugs that are effective for a given condition, and often just one.
Given the famines that regularly happen in countries that don't have free market food supplies, I wouldn't take it as a given that food is implicitly plentiful.
The inexpensive prices for drugs cited in the article happened before the US government got heavily involved with running the health care industry. Maybe that's a coincidence, but I doubt it.
It is comparatively free. You don't have to go through many regulatory hoops to grow food and sell it. It's not remotely comparable to concocting a medicine and selling it.
The end of famine in America happened around 1800, as the free market and the industrial revolution fixed that problem. Famine persists in other areas that insist on collectivized farms or have other problems that prevent free market agriculture, such as warfare.
Even the Soviet Union had to import wheat from Kansas, and allowed farmers to farm their own plots and sell the results, because the collectivized farms could not produce enough.
