Any Shkreli fans want to try to change my mind?

The embattled biopharmaceutical company sought to portray its price hike as costly only to insurance companies and not consumers, according to documents in a memo released Tuesday by Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The company also established patient assistance programs to take the focus away from what a 5,000% increase in price seemed likely to do to patient access, said the memo, which summarized more than 250,000 pages of Turing documents.

But patients were still slapped with co-pays ranging from $1,000 to even more than $16,000, according to the memo.

Here’s why Daraprim still costs $750 a pill

on Aug. 27, 2015 he wrote: “I think it will be huge. We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000…So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000—almost all of it is profit and I think we will get 3 years of that or more. Should be a very handsome investment for all of us. Let’s all cross our fingers that the estimates are accurate.”

‘$1bn here we come.’ — Martin Shkreli told Turing board as Daraprim buy got closer

No amount of patient assistance, 50% discounts or whatever off a $750/pill price is going to make up for the abnormal profits reaped. R&D and other excuses? I don't buy their PR. That came after the fact. Congress read all of Turing's internal emails and schemes. Shkreli's purpose was to extract extraordinary profits from a temporary monopoly selling to hospitals and desperate patients "for about 3 years". It looks like the whole acquisition and, under fire, the discounts and reductions in patient copays, were part of a profit maximization scheme or to manage the backlash (which is also profit maximization). It was a callous exercise in rentier economics.

Meanwhile, in Canada hospitals either make their own pyrimethamine (Daraprim) or use the generic equivalent which costs $1. It seems to me that allowing hedge funds to buy up sole-source medications can only end in tears.