California Voters Take on Big Pharma & Sky-High Drug Prices
Pirate capitalism as practiced by the Martin Shkreli and insurance company sorts is bound to fail over time. Piracy begets punishment, not sustainable profitability.
Sky-high drug prices are a scandal, but everyone knows that, even those responsible for the prices. They’re also a source of enormous profit and wealth, which is the problem. The drug companies, acting alone and through their lobbying arm, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), are literally sending people to their deaths in order to drain others of a few dollars more. It would not be out of line to call this behavior murderous and psychopathic — in a Martin Shkreli sense — though most would settle for a term from economics. Something related to capitalism, perhaps. Drug companies and their wealth have captured the national legislative and regulatory process and even some of the national patient advocacy groups (see below for more). How to crack the nut of deadly high drug prices and bring them down to an affordable level? Activists in California are making a very credible attempt at the state level with a November ballot initiative called the Drug Prices Relief Act, or Proposition 61.
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