“Very good”, he wrote to the chairman of the company’s board.
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Excerpts from more than 300,000 pages of documents obtained from Turing and Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) paint a dismal view of the industry’s standard operating procedures of employing public relations strategies geared to deflect attention from price increases.
When Shkreli headed the pharmaceutical company, he raised the price of the drug to $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill, a 5,000% increase.
In one August email, a Walgreens executive wrote to inquire if the company would grant exceptions for “those patients with a co-pay over the approved amount of $10,000”.
The company also said it is making overall changes in how it runs its business and “going forward, we expect our growth to be driven more by volume than by price”.
Valeantinterim Chief Executive Officer Howard Schiller, in his own prepared testimony, explained why the company chose to increase the prices of two cardiac drugs by 525 percent and 212 percent, and promised to end an era of sharp hikes.
To let the committee know that we’re watching, HRC is calling on our followers to tweet to the committee today and throughout the hearing tomorrow to hold Turing accountable. He said in a statement that the documents show “that many drug companies are lining their pockets at the expense of some of the most vulnerable families in our nation”. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Chair of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), Chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce; and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, seeking an investigation into the unconscionable action of Turing Pharmaceuticals.
On February 3, Shkreli was due in court for a preliminary hearing.
Martin Shkreli went from an egotistical pharmaceutical boy wonder running two small drug developers and live-streaming his daily activities to unemployed and facing securities fraud charges that could land him in prison for years. Shkreli, who has become the poster child of pharmaceutical-industry greed after hiking the price of an anti-infection drug by…
Valeant said in a statement provided to Bloomberg BNA Feb. 2 that before it purchased Nitropress and Isuprel, “it commissioned outside consultants to review the drug’s pricing”.
Regarding Valeant, the Democratic staff memo says the company identified revenue goals for Isuprel and Nitropress and raised the prices to reach those goals.
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The Sheepshead Bay-reared villain emerged from obscurity after he hiked the price of an HIV drug and then seemed to celebrate the ferocious backlash. At the start of 2016, drugmakers including Pfizer (PFE) and Allergan (AGN) boosted prices on brand-name medications, with one drug getting a 42.3 percent increase. In 2015, the company acquired the rights of the Daraprim drug and it was widely criticized for raising its prize over 5000%.
