Big Pharma Gouging Gets Even More Infuriating With New Site "Correction."

Mallinkrodt CEO Mark Trudeau. Getting rich off by endangering
infants by price gouging anti-seizure meds. Nice. 

Gizmodo, a news, technology and science website, recently ran an incredibly infuriating article about a company called Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.

This outfit bought another pharmaceutical company called Questcor in 2014.

Anyway, Gizmodo reported that Questcor and Mallinkrodt increased the price for a drug called Acthar from "just $40 in 2000 to over $40,000 today, despite the fact that Acthar has been o the market since 1952."

Acthar is a medication that helps prevent seizures, especially in infants, so it's kind of an important drug.  Mallinckrodt rakes in about $1 billion annually from the now overpriced Acthar, said Gizmodo, citing a CNN report.

When I read that, I thought that can't be true. That's just a ridiculous price increase that nobody would dare try.

It turned out the article wasn't entirely true. Mallinckrodt sent Gizmodo an email, demanding a retraction to an error in the story. Gizmodo obliged. Here's the mea culpa that Gizmodo ran:

"Correction: This article originally stated that the price of Acthar had gone 'from just $40 in 2000 to over $40,000 today.' A spokesperson for Mallinckrodt emailed to request a correction that Acthar actually costs $38,892 today. Gizmodo regrets the error. We also regret that every last one of these guys isn't in prison yet."

Yep, Mallinckrodt was upset, not that they increased the price of a necessary drug by nearly 100,000 percent within two decades. It's that Gizmodo ever so slightly exaggerated the cost of the drug.

As if bilking people to to the tune of $40,000 is beyond the pale but doing the same for a mere $38,892 is not.  No wonder the Gizmodo correction was so snarky.

Drug companies executives do deserve to rot in jail. The Gizmodo article accurately pointed out this:

"Curiously, there's a drug called Synacthen that's identical to Acthar and sells for just $33 in Canada. So why isn't Synacthen available in the U.S.? Because Mallinckrodt bought the U.S.rights to Synacthen and simply doesn't make it available to American consumers."

Because Mallinckrodt figures infants who are injured or die from seizures because medicines are too expensive are definitely worth the profits.

The Gizmodo article explained the Mallinckridt expects to pay a $15.4 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice because of allegations that Quester bribed doctors and their staff to prescribe the super expensive medication.

Yeah, to you and me, $15.4 million seems like a lot of money to you and me. But remember, Mallinckrodt makes $1 billion a year from Acthar alone. It's comparable to the "pain" I would experience if I got a $5 parking ticket.

If this whole thing was just one isolated incident to piss you off, that would be one thing. But the news has been filled with news of Big Pharma boosting prices to sky high levels for fun and especially profit.

It doesn't matter that these new sky high prices are literally killing people. You've heard the stories. Insulin prices have soared, for example. Type 1 diabetics were paying an average of $5,705 in 2016, almost twice as much as just four years earlier. Insulin prices have spiraled in the three years since.

According to USA Today, the Senate Finance Committe told insulin makers to detail their price increases. One vial of Eli Lilly's Humalog went from $35 in 2001 to $234 in 2015. Between 2013 and this year, Nordisk's insulin went from $289 to $540.

The price got so high that diabetics started to ration their insulin. That killed many of them.  These deaths are worth if for the millions these pharma executives are raking in, apparently.  I guess they found a way to literally get away with murder.

The Pharma industry has guaranteed their profits through blocking competition, herculean efforts to confuse patients so they don't understand how much drugs really cost, notes a U.S. News and World Report.

All in the name of profits. We've gotten so dystopian that we just accept this as normal, when people should be marching in front of these evil Big Pharma companies with pitchforks and torches.

I hope there's a special place in hell for these pharma and insurance executives who think it's OK to literally kill people so they can suck up even more millions of dollars.