You’ve heard of Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund manager convicted of securities fraud who became infamous for buying a lifesaving AIDS drug and increasing the price by 5,000 percent. Shkreli’s notoriety and
subsequent conviction once seemed to suggest that the government would actually do something about pharma profiteering—but years later, it’s clear that his scheme of acquiring ‘orphan drugs’, or drugs to treat rare diseases that only a few will ever need, and then hijacking prices, is now Big Pharma’s prevailing business model.
For the August 2023 print issue, Moe Tkacik details how Big Pharma’s drive for bigger and bigger profits has made business practices that were once seen as outliers the industry standard. You can read the whole story here.
This story is part of our ongoing series on the business of health care—the inner workings of the monopolies and cartels extracting
ever-greater sums for ever-lousier outcomes, and the policies and protocols pushing doctors and nurses to the brink—and increasingly into labor unions. You can read the entire series here.
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