Last week on an episode of “The Nightly Show,” host Larry Wilmore introduced a new segment called “Devil’s Dung Pile,” meant to spotlight some of the worst offenders in corporate America. The segment focused on Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old CEO who just purchased the company that manufactures Daraprim. Daraprim is widely known to be a life-saving drug for AIDS patients. Prior to Shkreli’s purchase, the drug cost $13.50 per pill. Shkreli just bumped that cost up to $750. Wilmore’s segment on the issue includes a clip in which Shkreli attempts to justify the price hike, arguing “you only need about 100 pills, so at the end of the day the price per course of treatment [before it was raised] to save your life was only about a thousand dollars.” Shkreli delivers this statement matter-of-factly, as if anyone would agree that it should cost more to survive.
There is little debate over whether Shkreli’s decision was a bad one. Wilmore deemed him a “future Batman villain,” while other media outlets went with titles such as, “Big Pharma’s Biggest A**hole” and “the most hated man in America.” But Shkreli is just an outstanding example of an ongoing problem. Americans pay vastly more than citizens of other countries — in some cases three times as much — for the same drugs. In 2014, doctors and hospitals in the United States were paid over $6 billion by drug and health care companies, an obvious conflict of interest when those doctors are deciding which drugs to prescribe. If Shkreli is a villain, he’s not the first one, and the laws governing our health care system made it all possible.
The outcry over Shkreli took an oddly tabloidesque turn. First he fired back at his critics by tweeting Eminem lyrics and retweeted the miniscule group of people who weren’t critical of his decision. Next, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton published a set of photos supposedly showing a conversation between Shrkeli and a woman he met on the popular dating app, Tinder. If nothing else, it’s alarming that the control of a life-saving drug lies in the hands of a 32-year-old business tycoon who prefers to deal with business via Twitter and Tinder. But much to my surprise, the woman who claimed to have chatted with Shkreli on Tinder made a valid point, arguing that he did “what so many Big Pharma heads do: privilege profit over regard for human life.”
In the many countries where people are paying far less for the same drugs, those lower prices are due to negotiations between the government and pharmaceutical companies. A brief by the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains that “while governments are granting the industry patent monopolies that prevent competitors from selling the same drug at a lower price, they do not allow drug companies to charge whatever price they want.” The United States could implement a similar system. Granted, government intervention in the health care system has proved unpopular with many Americans, but it is one possible solution to a problem that seems to have everyone outraged.
Shkreli has become the man we all love to hate. It’s easy to point at him and cry villain, and it’s not inaccurate. There seems to be little dispute that increasing the price of a life-saving drug by 4000 percent is wrong. In another clip on “The Nightly Show,” even Donald Trump declared, “it was a disgusting thing that [Shkreli] did… He ought to be ashamed of himself.” But few people have stopped to consider that this outrage is made possible because we live in a country where a business tycoon can purchase control of a vital drug and do what he pleases with it. What Shkreli did may have been wrong, but it was entirely legal. Rather than becoming outraged that he did this, why haven’t we been outraged all along that he could? We all seem to agree he should not be able to raise a drug price by 4000 percent, but it is our own system that allowed him to do just that.
Part of Shkreli’s defense of the price hike was that insurance companies will cover most of the cost, so patients’ expenses will remain about the same. He has given little evidence to support that claim, and it still doesn’t justify an exponential price increase when lives are at stake. Even if it is true, it completely ignores the fact that around 32 million people in the United States have no health insurance. Many of the people who have come out strongly against Shkreli’s actions, Trump included, are the same people who decried the Affordable Care Act. Not only does our current health care system allow pharmaceutical CEOs to jack up prices, but our government cannot agree on a way to help people pay for those overpriced drugs. So what are all those millions of people expected to do? Should they have to come up with the $750,000 it will now cost to get a full course of treatment?
Toss whatever insults you like at Martin Shkreli; I’m as disgusted as you are. But in a few months he’ll be old news, and the system that made his actions possible will remain the same. Shkreli is one in a long line of Big Pharma CEOs who prioritize profit over saving lives. It is naive to think they will do any differently if they don’t have to.
Nora Walls is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at n.walls@cavalierdaily.com.
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