He's not on trial for his infamous 5,000% price hike of Daraprim. He's on trial for lying to hedge fund investors and siphoning millions of dollars in assets from his biopharm company to repay them.
Tough start with the jury pool:
| The first potential juror interviewed Monday, a young woman in her 30s, called Shkreli "an evil man." Another woman said she knew he’d been labeled "the most hated man in America," while a third woman declared, "I looked right at him and, in my head, I said ‘that’s a snake.’" They were among at least a dozen people dismissed from jury service because of their strong opinions about Shkreli. |
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Those people shouldnt have gotten sick if they couldnt afford to pay 50x markups.
There's gotta be at least ONE on this board.
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who feels compelled to defend Shkreli? It's not a fun conversation.
There's gotta be at least ONE on this board.
Just like there will be at least ONE who will use him to tar an entire industry.
LOL, a guy I've known a long time has the same personality as Shkreli and is a big fan of his. It's brutal.
I'm all for the angry mob running him out of town with torches and pitchforks, but he's just a player in a terrible system. My concern is that we're going to focus our energy on vilifying him (and the next guy, and so on) instead of fixing the system.
It never answers important questions, like: What exactly did he do? Why is this legal and what led us up to this point? Who else is doing this? How can we change laws to prevent this in the future?
The linked article is. Perhaps you can make time to read it.
The linked article is. Perhaps you can make time to read it.
Then why did you link the article?
He's not the first idiot to think he was smarter than the rest of the world in his 20's.
That's not my impression. More like what ctc said -
"not the first idiot to think he was smarter than the rest of the world in his 20's" ....
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this thread is not "coverage" of him.
The linked article is. Perhaps you can make time to read it.
Then why did you link the article?
He's not the first idiot to think he was smarter than the rest of the world in his 20's.
What? Why did I link the article?
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In comment 13512053 Mr. Bungle said:
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this thread is not "coverage" of him.
The linked article is. Perhaps you can make time to read it.
Then why did you link the article?
He's not the first idiot to think he was smarter than the rest of the world in his 20's.
What? Why did I link the article?
"this thread is not "coverage" of him."
Right there. Why did you link an article that was "coverage" of him?
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In comment 13512060 ctc in ftmyers said:
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In comment 13512053 Mr. Bungle said:
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this thread is not "coverage" of him.
The linked article is. Perhaps you can make time to read it.
Then why did you link the article?
He's not the first idiot to think he was smarter than the rest of the world in his 20's.
What? Why did I link the article?
"this thread is not "coverage" of him."
Right there. Why did you link an article that was "coverage" of him?
He was using posts in this thread as examples of bad "coverage" of Shkreli.
The linked article -- which is coverage -- didn't have what he was complaining about.
This was exactly what I was going to post when I read that OP, this guy's face should be pasted over punching dummies.
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This was exactly what I was going to post when I read that OP, this guy's face should be pasted over punching dummies.
Careful. You don't any to contribute any "dumb takes"...
I have a HS friend who was in my wedding, disappeared for several years to Central America, and is now an oral surgeon in Raleigh actually admires how Shkreli uses the system to his advantage.
But I'm 100% convinced that my friend will be charged in the next few years with fraud and/or doing unseemly things to women while they are under anasthesia, so I'm thinking that's the type of guy who supports Shkreli.
I'm going to make this very simple for you...
There's no such thing as ripping off insurance companies. When you rip off insurance companies, you're ripping off individuals, just adding a stop along the way.
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but didn't the hike of Daraprim overwhelmingly rip off insurance companies, not individuals (aside from out of pocket).
I'm going to make this very simple for you...
There's no such thing as ripping off insurance companies. When you rip off insurance companies, you're ripping off individuals, just adding a stop along the way.
Hope that's simple enough. Maybe it's worth an analogy to the Fram oil filter slogan: "You can pay me now or (rip off insurance companies) pay me later (higher premiums)."
He might not be the root cause, but people who act like him are a huge part of the problem.
Instead of trying to find root causes, the approach should be to find ways to identify those taking advantage of the system (whether legally or through loopholes) and take swift action to prevent it from happening again.
He might not be the root cause, but people who act like him are a huge part of the problem.
Agree completely. The ramp up cost/time to bring a competitor drug to an already generic drug to market is substantial due to regs. And the prize for being then 2nd drug on market for a not-very-popular drug is that you're in a commodity price war -- it's nothing like the advantage for being the sole source.
The regs are good and helpful for safety reasons. They're just being exploited on pricing.
To Deej's point, it is expensive to introduce a product to the market because of regulations. Regulations are needed due to ensuring the safety of products, but when people take advantage of the loopholes, either through unfair pricing or defrauding on the safety or efficacy of the products, it hurts everyone involved.
Basically, it is like leaving a bank vault door open, and believing that walking in and taking the money is OK. It isn't - it is just easier to do.
That's unfortunate, because there are a lot of such people.
Can he take a tour of North Korea?
Can he take a tour of North Korea?
Does he collect propaganda posters?
Just like there will be at least ONE who will use him to tar an entire industry.
And we have a winner
Those people shouldnt have gotten sick if they couldnt afford to pay 50x markups.
Deej, that's hilarious. You sound like a Hunter guy. I was '07.
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but didn't the hike of Daraprim overwhelmingly rip off insurance companies, not individuals (aside from out of pocket).
I'm going to make this very simple for you...
There's no such thing as ripping off insurance companies. When you rip off insurance companies, you're ripping off individuals, just adding a stop along the way.
As someone who has been denied legit claims and had to fight (tooth and nail) while sick for approval, I don't have a lot of sympathy for insurance companies.
Yep, costs trickle down. I understand that. How much do you think this hike really added to, say the average monthly premium of a Blue Cross customer? A penny? A dollar?
What probably hurts us more are the dozens of other executives doing the same thing on more of an 'under the radar' scale. Definitely shame Shkreli, but let's bring attention to some of these other executives and also try to figure out an actual solution.
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In comment 13511955 Mad Mike said:
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This was exactly what I was going to post when I read that OP, this guy's face should be pasted over punching dummies.
Careful. You don't any to contribute any "dumb takes"...
I came across pretty shitty in my 6/26/2017 6:52 post. I accept this mocking.
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In comment 13512025 phil in arizona said:
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but didn't the hike of Daraprim overwhelmingly rip off insurance companies, not individuals (aside from out of pocket).
I'm going to make this very simple for you...
There's no such thing as ripping off insurance companies. When you rip off insurance companies, you're ripping off individuals, just adding a stop along the way.
As someone who has been denied legit claims and had to fight (tooth and nail) while sick for approval, I don't have a lot of sympathy for insurance companies.
Yep, costs trickle down. I understand that. How much do you think this hike really added to, say the average monthly premium of a Blue Cross customer? A penny? A dollar?
What probably hurts us more are the dozens of other executives doing the same thing on more of an 'under the radar' scale. Definitely shame Shkreli, but let's bring attention to some of these other executives and also try to figure out an actual solution.
This is a dumb take if there ever was one.
A penny? A dollar? Do you think this was the only instance of this happening? If it happens every time, even if only for a dollar - don't you think it adds up?
I'm not exactly breaking out the violins for the insurance companies here, but you're being EXTREMELY short sighted and not true to your own opinion of these companies if you don't believe that every penny of fraud/gouging that they see gets passed on to the consumer. We're the ones getting ripped off, the insurance companies are just the medium.
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same time as me but he was many years younger. Still, alums gotta stick together.
Those people shouldnt have gotten sick if they couldnt afford to pay 50x markups.
Deej, that's hilarious. You sound like a Hunter guy. I was '07.
Yeah, '97. Just had my 20 year, people tried to convince eachother that no one looks like they got old (they did).
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In comment 13512309 jcn56 said:
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In comment 13512025 phil in arizona said:
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but didn't the hike of Daraprim overwhelmingly rip off insurance companies, not individuals (aside from out of pocket).
I'm going to make this very simple for you...
There's no such thing as ripping off insurance companies. When you rip off insurance companies, you're ripping off individuals, just adding a stop along the way.
As someone who has been denied legit claims and had to fight (tooth and nail) while sick for approval, I don't have a lot of sympathy for insurance companies.
Yep, costs trickle down. I understand that. How much do you think this hike really added to, say the average monthly premium of a Blue Cross customer? A penny? A dollar?
What probably hurts us more are the dozens of other executives doing the same thing on more of an 'under the radar' scale. Definitely shame Shkreli, but let's bring attention to some of these other executives and also try to figure out an actual solution.
This is a dumb take if there ever was one.
A penny? A dollar? Do you think this was the only instance of this happening? If it happens every time, even if only for a dollar - don't you think it adds up?
I'm not exactly breaking out the violins for the insurance companies here, but you're being EXTREMELY short sighted and not true to your own opinion of these companies if you don't believe that every penny of fraud/gouging that they see gets passed on to the consumer. We're the ones getting ripped off, the insurance companies are just the medium.
I think asking how much this one isolated incident raises the average insurance premium is a fair question. One issue I have with the media that we often get these broad statistics that it's hard to quantify the actual impact. How many "self pay" people are going to get screwed over by this? Who are some other people doing this?
These instances DO add up. Reread the last paragraph in my previous post, I think there is a lot of common ground there.
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In comment 13511974 Deej said:
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same time as me but he was many years younger. Still, alums gotta stick together.
Those people shouldnt have gotten sick if they couldnt afford to pay 50x markups.
Deej, that's hilarious. You sound like a Hunter guy. I was '07.
Yeah, '97. Just had my 20 year, people tried to convince eachother that no one looks like they got old (they did).
You're old, Deej...JFC...;)
I'm '98, and there are a lot of my high school and college classmates, who have aged...not so well.
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Just like there will be at least ONE who will use him to tar an entire industry.
And we have a winner
And now we have a defender of big pharma? That's a large burden o carry
Will I defend everything big pharma does? No. Some of the pricing is very aggressive, especially recently on generics (where a lot of sole-source drugs are getting pricier with no new development costs). But it gets negotiated down. Pharma gets blamed to a ridiculous degree for the cost of healthcare. Pharma is a small but not insignificant piece of health spend. Doctors, hospitals, etc -- that's where the cost centers are. People dont want to crap on doctors so they punch up pharma. But medicine is one of those things that is getting more expensive vs. almost everything else which gets less expensive. That's not doctor greed, it's just a fact that economy-wide wage raises increase the wages in industries like education and medicine which are more resistant to productivity gains.
Deej : 4:11 pm : link : reply
should really look into how expensive it is to take a new drug to market, especially when you account for drugs that fail during development. It is staggering. 9 or 10 figures. And risky.
Just one element of the approval process is to do a double blind study or trial. That alone will often run $450-$700K.
To get full approval of most drugs it is a minimum of $1.5M. The article below says the average is $2.5M. Most people don't realize this, so they use pharma as a punching bag.
Cost to develop drug is $2.5M - ( New Window )
I wouldn't say I know enough to have a strong opinion one way or another but I will say that in my time clerking I had to review significant big pharma litigation and the lengths to which they go to make sure they have the various markets cornered blew my mind.
Yeah. That Tufts study probably overstates things by counting the money they could have made on their money as a "cost". But there is no getting around it -- Phase 3 trials are expensive, and drugs often fail in Phase 2 or 3, and need to be retested or abandoned as a sunk cost.
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In comment 13511976 njm said:
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Just like there will be at least ONE who will use him to tar an entire industry.
And we have a winner
And now we have a defender of big pharma? That's a large burden o carry
Do I hear an "Oops"?
And let me bring up a problem that I've previously broached and have no solution to. To a significant degree, the rest of the world is "free riding" on the US paying an outsized proportion of the development and trial costs of new pharmaceuticals. They set prices that might reflect the production costs and some profit once these drugs are approved, but not development and trial. And it's not a recent phenomenon.
And let me bring up a problem that I've previously broached and have no solution to. To a significant degree, the rest of the world is "free riding" on the US paying an outsized proportion of the development and trial costs of new pharmaceuticals. They set prices that might reflect the production costs and some profit once these drugs are approved, but not development and trial. And it's not a recent phenomenon.
You also would have to factor in high pharma profit margins vs. other sectors (which suggest maybe that US isnt subsidizing other countries as much as failing to bargain effectively, leading to "excess" profits), US drug ad spending, unique US regulatory costs, and US cost of living. The subsidy probably exists to some degree but the size is tough to pin down.
And let me bring up a problem that I've previously broached and have no solution to. To a significant degree, the rest of the world is "free riding" on the US paying an outsized proportion of the development and trial costs of new pharmaceuticals. They set prices that might reflect the production costs and some profit once these drugs are approved, but not development and trial. And it's not a recent phenomenon.
A common though specious refrain, encountered most often among the mind-numbing Foxian dregs of our media.
Whether as a result of ignorance or, more likely, as a means to excuse some of the more unpalatable meddling by pharma (like their relentless lobbying circa 2003 to get jerked off by then Louisiana rep turned Big Pharma lobbyist Billy Tauzin spearheading the Part D legislation), it's bizarre that the refrain endures.
One can be fairly confident that Roche, Novartis, Sanofi, AZN, Bayer, GSK, Boehringer, etc. do not sit idly by as their American counterparts develop the cash cow drugs of tomorrow.
In 2016 the leading R&D firms were Novartis & Roche, which are both Swiss.
Even a casual effort to post based upon facts is reliably helpful for the conversation.
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Do I hear an "Oops"?
And let me bring up a problem that I've previously broached and have no solution to. To a significant degree, the rest of the world is "free riding" on the US paying an outsized proportion of the development and trial costs of new pharmaceuticals. They set prices that might reflect the production costs and some profit once these drugs are approved, but not development and trial. And it's not a recent phenomenon.
A common though specious refrain, encountered most often among the mind-numbing Foxian dregs of our media.
Whether as a result of ignorance or, more likely, as a means to excuse some of the more unpalatable meddling by pharma (like their relentless lobbying circa 2003 to get jerked off by then Louisiana rep turned Big Pharma lobbyist Billy Tauzin spearheading the Part D legislation), it's bizarre that the refrain endures.
One can be fairly confident that Roche, Novartis, Sanofi, AZN, Bayer, GSK, Boehringer, etc. do not sit idly by as their American counterparts develop the cash cow drugs of tomorrow.
In 2016 the leading R&D firms were Novartis & Roche, which are both Swiss.
Even a casual effort to post based upon facts is reliably helpful for the conversation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Novartis and Roche et. al. all sell those pharmaceuticals (or hope to anyway) in the US. So the nationality of the manufacturer is irrelevant and not something I made an issue of (and I'm trying to see how what I wrote can be interpreted in that way), nor is the situs of the research. It's the sales in the US market that counts.
In other words: intense & relentless DC lobbying (e.g. summarily quashing Medicare drug negotiation) = price gouged American consumer which in turn = consistently lined big pharma pockets to R&D drugs for us & the world?
Thanks, Americans, for swallowing so many pills and getting fucked over on pricing when you do. – World.
"Critics" of big pharma (the worthwhile ones anyway) generally take issue with the sensational amount spent on bribing our elected officials – by far the most of any industry over the past decade if I’m not mistaken – as opposed to getting fair market value for indeed often extremely pricey and often beneficial patented drugs.
Direct marketing to our doctors is also a potentially unseemly practice. How often, for instance, is the geriatric shrink getting blown by a fresh grad, big titted pharma rep in order to prescribe Zoloft over Paxil? More often than we think no doubt.
But I disagree that the rest of the world is free-loading. As the number one market in the world, companies are competing hardest for our business, and that has lots of benefits. And if your in a poor country that we think is "free loading"....pharma doesn't give a shit about you, or your child with a terminal illness. Which would you prefer?