Dirty Money: Price Gouging The Cost of Medications

Last night on Netflix I watched a show called Dirty Money, Episode 3: Drug Short. This episode is about Pharmaceutical companies price gouging the cost of Medications.

Price Gouging refers to the practice of raising the price of goods, services, or commodities, to an unreasonable or unfair level.

Price gouging in the United States by Pharmaceutical companies is becoming a more and more frequent problem and remains largely unbeknownst to most people. In August of 2016, Valeant Pharmaceuticals was sued for price gouging which became the first litigation to shed light on the greedy tactics Pharmaceutical companies are using to increase profits for their companies. In essence, Valeant and Turing pharmaceuticals bought monopoly positions, through merger and acquisitions, in old drugs that faced no direct competition in the United States and raised prices aggressively.

While the Netflix show Dirty Money does a great job at explaining the tactics used by Valeant Pharmaceuticals to raise the price of its drugs, and raises awareness of an ever increasingly prevalent issue. This problem, does not stop with Valeant Pharmaceuticals. In fact, many pharmaceutical companies are doing the very same thing, which can be seen in the picture below to highlight only but a few.

EpiPen is an injection that contains a drug called epinephrine which narrows blood vessels and opens airways in the lungs and is used to treat severe life threatening allergic reactions.

In the hospital today during rounds, a young girl was admitted due to an anaphylaxis reaction (a severe allergic reaction) to something she ate. When mom was asked if she had given her daughter the EpiPen, she responded saying she was hesitant because of the cost of the medication. As you can see from the chart below, this life-saving medication has been subject to egregious price gouging over the past couple of years!

Unfortunately these tactics by pharmaceutical companies have become more of the norm rather than the exception. Numerous other medications currently on the market have also been subject to the same unjust price hikes. Thus, hopefully by raising awareness of this issue will solutions then be set in place to regulate these unjust price hikes that are ultimately passed onto patients themselves.