[LemonJam]

There is a saying in the medical field that real profit is found in treatment as opposed to the cure. Never has that been proven truer than with the recent price surge in Daraprim, a drug used to fight a common parasite that is found in more than 60 million Americans and can be deadly to pregnant women as well as both cancer and AIDS patients.

Just how big of a surge has there been in the price?

About 5,000%

The drug, which was recently selling for $13.50 per pill, now has a new price tag of $750!

It hasn’t been reinvented, or improved in any discernible way. The only change has been to who owns the rights to the drug. Impax, a medium-sized pharmaceutical company sold the rights to the drug to Turing Pharmaceuticals, a much larger company who decided a price increase was necessary.

“This is a tremendous increase,” said Judith Aberg, a spokesperson for the HIV Medicine Association. “Even patients with insurance could have trouble affording the medication,” she said. A monthly course of Daraprim will now cost consumers $75,000. And even with insurance, patients would have to lay out an enormous co-pay to keep the Toxoplasma parasite from killing them.

Sadly, increases such as this one are becoming more and more common even as fewer Americans can afford prescription drugs for the most basic healthcare needs.

Last year the cost of Captoprill, a generic blood pressure medication, increased more than 2,700% while albuterol sulfate, an asthma medication, increased more than 3,400% according to the National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) statistics.

With the sharp increase in prices has come greater media scrutiny and political maneuvering in an attempt to reign in the yearly increases which are driving huge pharmaceutical industry and health insurance company profits at the expense of American citizens.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), along with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md), has recently introduced a new bill aimed at keeping generic drugs affordable.

“The short answer is greed,” Sanders said. “They can do it. They can get away with it. They can make outrageous sums of profits and money on this and that’s what they’re doing. Our job in Congress is to say to these drug companies that you can’t keep ripping off the American people.”

While citing raw material shortages, manufacturing disruptions, and factory closings as the reason for such rapid increase in prices, industry leader Merck reported $42.2 billion in global sales for 2014 with just over $9.7 billion in profit.

If reading those numbers makes you feel like you are going to have a heart attack…don’t, because you probably can’t afford the treatment.

http://usuncut.com/news/company-hike...-and-aids-drug

All done by the sociopath CEO Martin Shkreli, who did a similar thing last year when he introduced a 20-fold price increase for Thiola, a drug used to treat Cystinuria.

Just wanted to enlighten people as to how much of a piece of **** this human being is.