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Businesses The Almighty Buck Medicine

Drugmaker Tripled the Price of a Pill as it Pursued Coronavirus Use (axios.com) 85

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
This month, Jaguar Health more than tripled the price of its lone FDA-approved drug, right after asking the federal government to expand the use of its drug to coronavirus patients. AmiMoJo shares a report: Jaguar Health drastically raised the price of a drug during the height of the pandemic, but executives argued the move was needed to stave off the company's collapse. Going into this year, the list price of a 60-pill bottle of Mytesi -- an antidiarrheal medication specifically for people with HIV/AIDS who are on antiretroviral drugs -- was $668.52. On April 9, Jaguar Health raised the price to $2,206.52, according to pricing data from Elsevier's Gold Standard Drug Database. On March 21, Jaguar Health asked the FDA to authorize emergency use of Mytesi for COVID-19 patients who were experiencing any diarrhea or "diarrhea associated with certain antiviral treatments" including remdesivir, among others.
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Drugmaker Tripled the Price of a Pill as it Pursued Coronavirus Use More

Drugmaker Tripled the Price of a Pill as it Pursued Coronavirus Use

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  • Nice (Score:2)

    by pele ( 151312 )

    Good thing there was an emergency bill passed in my country which prevented exactly this type of behaviour. And LOADS of fines have been issued since, too. Not just pharmaceuticals, groceries and fuel too.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SirAstral ( 1349985 )

      Well, good for you, here in America we love our corrupt too much to get rid of them. We only give a shit when the "other" team is being corrupt... it's more than fine if our team is fucking us over... so long as they regurgitate the necessary rhetoric we like to hear in the process.

      You can totally fuck the shit out of us so long as you make it clear those others are getting fucked worse! We love a good fucking and will vote for it every election, a much as possible!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bobby ( 109046 )

        I appreciate your sarcasm and you make good points. However, iirc, in the US it's illegal to raise a price of anything deemed necessary, in a crisis, more than 10%. So hopefully this will get fixed and the company fined youge. (that's supposed to be "huge" spoken in a Trump accent)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by whitroth ( 9367 )

          Har-de-har har.

          Maybe, after the Orange Psycho's out of office (and in jail), a real AG will sue, but shareholders shouldn't worry - I'm sure the fine won't be more than couch change to the company.

        • "in the US it's illegal to raise a price of anything deemed necessary, in a crisis, more than 10%"

          That's such a bad statement and so easy to get around. See below..

          Define "deemed necessary" legally
          Define crisis? When does it start and end legally?
          Where does the 10% rate start? For how long? What if the components have gone up 100%? This rule could force the manufacturer/reseller to sell at a loss or just stop making/selling a product.
          What if a crisis lasts years. Can the price not raise more than 10% for th

        • Yes you are right, but remember what I said.... the corruption in place will only react when it suits their interests. If putting a stop to the price gouging is of interest they will do it. And yes we do have some of that taking place right now. But we already know that there has been a lot more focus on the hoarders.

          They have been physically taking products from them which is wrong and unconstitutional. They just need to tell them 10% is all you can charge and for every product you sell over 10% markup

        • in the US it's illegal to raise a price of anything deemed necessary, in a crisis, more than 10%.

          Citation needed.

          Some individual states have laws against "gouging" but I know of no federal law. I have a hard time seeing how such a law could be constitutional.

        • 10% price rise limits can still add up to doubling every week, if you do it every day.

          People really struggle to understand exponential growth, even when it is in their news feed every day.

    • Your country is part of the problem. International agreements often create a situation where a company must offer their drug for sale to you or else they lose Patent protections and your country can produce it themselves. When your country then sets a fixed price on the drug, the company raises prices in other countries to compensate. The end result is that much of the reason people in the US pay hugely inflated prices is because we are subsidizing your drug costs. Yes, there are also plenty of instances of
  • Seriously though, raising prices with high demand is exactly how the world works no matter what country you are in. Remember the idiots hording hand sanitizer and selling it for a higher price? The issue wasn't the high price they were charging, but that they went to tons of stores and bought out the their supply so people could not get access to it. That was because hand sanitizer did not increase in price at those stores due to high demand. If hand sanitizer was adjusted to be priced appropriately in the

    • "raising prices with high demand"

      -1, offtopic

      Demand hadn't risen. The manufacturer was trying to induce more demand, but neither demand nor supply had changed yet so there was no reason for the market clearing price to change.

  • According to our pols, we are in a "war". I heard in WW2, profiteering was severally punished. I guess in this "war" profiteering is now allowed ? Why not, something needs to make up the losses in the stock market for the 1%.

    But as always, I guess it depends on who is doing the profiteering

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sycodon ( 149926 )

      In WWII, the Press was severely restricted, stories censored, information withheld.

    • "profiteering" is bad but if price needs to be changed for financial survival of a company (if true in this case, I don't know) that's fine. Companies can't have costs more than what they make.

  • Production (Score:3)

    by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @10:43AM (#59984356)
    In order to encourage higher production of a product there has to be a benefit to those that produce it. If a company is making something at a loss, there is zero incentive for other to jump in on the train and start producing it as well. The competition is also encourage to produce it more efficiently than the others. Things that are in high demand need to be high priced or else production will not increase. This only works if they aren't monopolies. I thought in the US we required a certain level of licensing of products to avoid monopolies on technologies but I have no idea if or how that applies to pharmaceuticals.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      People will pay almost anything to avoid dying of diarrhoea. Even if it's illegal it will take so long to prosecute and the fine will be so pathetic they might as well do it anyway.

    • using the Defense Production Act. You know, like we do in a war. Because they have benefited tremendously from our society and now it's time for them to give back. My tax dollars pay for the military that keeps other countries from stealing their shit. And I'm not even in the military. Imagine being ex-army or current enlistment and needing this drug.

      Or if you don't like that the government can just manufacture it themselves.

      But sure, let's do profiteering. Because that works. I'm sure the company

    • The manufacturer was trying to induce more demand. That tells us that their production capacity was already in excess of current demand or else they could not have hoped to have satisfied an increase in demand.

    • You must not know any farmers. If a farmer is guaranteed a good profit per acre he will try to plant every acre in the county, including his front yard. No price increase is needed, more product sold equals more profit. Of course in real life that leads to over production and he usually ends up not being able to sell all of his produce for any price.

  • And start calling them Ferengi?
    Maybe homo ferengis?

    Meaning they still have rights (so no revenge please),
    but they don't belong in human society (and can go live somewhere else, and make their own [predictably short-lived] society)!

    • There Ferengi homeworld was a perfect satire of the USA. Standing in the waiting room is free but a chair will cost you. Same thing with stairs and the elevator.

  • You can buy a bottle of herbal dragon's blood for $10 which contains this $2000 chemical cocktail.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Sounds like this stuff has been in use for thousands of years

  • If you raise the price, people will think twice about buying 1000x of them and putting it in their basement.

    Also, the people who took the initiative for helping people are rewarded.
  • Seems to me there is too little information here to justify the vitriol. Basic supply and demand dictates that a market will experience sudden price increases when there are demand shocks. Over time those price may come down with an increase in supply, but without that supply increase prices will remain high if demand remains high. It's the market solution to the scarcity issue, but most people don't understand or refuse to accept that all goods are finite, hence they are scarce. To better understand thes
  • Using poor sales as an excise to triple prices is a loser move. Let his company die off.
  • This is a classic pandemic entrepreneur move...

  • For all the Presidential candidates who are promising " Universal Health Care ", this is the kind of shit that will need to be fully regulated before UHC has a chance to become a reality.

    As long as you allow Big Pharma and Big Healthcare to set their own prices without any sort of reality check or cap in place, there is no way we'll ever be able to afford it.

    Annnnnnnnnd . . . .

    Since both industries shovel piles of money into the pockets of elected leadership in this country, the odds of ever getting UHC are

  • Seize their patents, yachts, chatous, vacation homes, hotels, bank accounts, and everything else they own. After you've taken it all, drag them to the middle of the square and finish them off with a guillotine! Show them what should be done with war/crisis profiteers!

  • ...is why the powers that be are trying to nuke hydroxychloroquine via the useful idiots on the left that use the excuse that Trump mentioned it to lie their asses off about it and clear the way for some big pharma puke to usher something onto the stage that costs $100 / pill. Plain as the nose on your face...

  • There is no "free market" when the consumer either buys the product or dies if he does not buy the product. Yeah, that is tru for sure. Mary, writer at Rapidessay [rapidessay.com]

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