Big Pharma in death throes? Drug companies jack up prices as economically strained Americans seek affordable alternatives

September 30th, 2015

Awake Goy

(NaturalNews) People are tired of being used as pawns in a rigged economy. They’re sick of a medical system that abuses them for everything they’re worth. People are beginning to abandon the rules of the game, exiting a complicated medical system that has played them for a fool. People no longer want to be moved around like chess pieces by the master hands of pharmaceutical companies that only add new side effects to their life while draining their finances. They are tired of being played by competing pharmaceutical companies, which play for checkmate, not for healing.

The American medical system is full of caring people, but from the top down, pharmaceutical economics are set up to keep people sick and dependent. The evil in the pharmaceutical industry is beginning to show more than ever.

The most recent example of Big Pharma’s evil comes from Turing Pharmaceuticals. Founder and chief executive of the new startup, Martin Shkreli, took ownership of a 62-year-old drug called Daraprim and raised the price of each tablet from $13.50 to $750. A few years ago, Daraprim cost only $1 a tablet, but as new pharmaceutical companies acquired its marketing license, its price rose sharply. Now, under the command of 32-year-old Shkreli, the pill costs 750 times what it used to cost a few years ago. Sales of the drug in 2010 were $667,000. By 2011, sales jumped to $6.3 million, even as prescription numbers stayed the same at around 12,700.

For several decades, Daraprim has been used to treat toxoplasmosis, which is a parasitic infection that can be passed on to a baby born from an already infected mother. It’s a rare infection but is still observed in AIDS patients who have compromised immune systems.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association wrote to Turing Pharmaceuticals, blasting them for price gouging that is “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.”

Staying true to his arrogance, Shkreli replied, “This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business. This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

When he was in his 20s, Shkreli also drew ire while piloting MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company. He was caught trying to convince the FDA to approve certain drugs made by the companies his stocks were shorting.

Turing Pharmaceutical’s outrageous price increases are not the only signs of the pharmaceutical industry imploding in on itself. In fact, many pharmaceutical companies now buy up old drugs, give them new marketing appeal, and then jack up their price as if they are some “specialty” drug.

When Rodelis Therapeutics acquired the drug Cycloserine, they jacked up the price of 30 pills from $500 to $10,800.

When Valeant Pharmaceuticals bought up an old heart drug called Isuprel, the company quickly raised the price by 525 percent, ultimately drawing a Congressional investigation led by Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Maryland Representative Elijah E. Cummings. Sanders and Cummings found out that the drug’s price had already been quintupled by the previous Big Pharma buyer. They also found out that an antibiotic called Doxycycline shot up from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014!

The pharmaceutical industry is masquerading as a system that promotes healt,h but all it really does is dominate people’s lives through price gouging and unwanted side effects. The more people begin to see this, the more they will turn to the actual answers that promote holistic healing. Big Pharma is committing suicide as its greed bleeds through. The manipulative climate of pharmaceutical economics is not conducive for healing. The more people realize that, the more they will seek answers outside of the pill bottle.

Sources for this article include:
NYTimes.com