The real reason Big Pharma wants to help pay for your prescription

The real reason Big Pharma wants to help pay for your prescription
Benjamin Elgin and Robert Langreth - Bloomberg - Thursday, May 19, 2016

In August 2015, Turing Pharmaceuticals and its then-chief executive, Martin Shkreli, purchased a drug called Daraprim and immediately raised its price more than 5,000 percent. Within days, Turing contacted Patient Services Inc., or PSI, a charity that helps people meet the insurance copayments on costly drugs. Turing wanted PSI to create a fund for patients with toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that is most often treated with Daraprim.

Having just made Daraprim much more costly, Turing was now offering to make it more affordable. But this is not a feel-good story. It’s a story about why expensive drugs keep getting more expensive, and how U.S. taxpayers support a billion-dollar system in which charitable giving is, in effect, a very profitable form of investing for drug companies—one that may also be tax-deductible.

“It looks great for pharmaceutical companies to say they are helping patients get the drugs,” says Adriane Fugh-Berman, a doctor who’s studied pharma marketing practices for three decades and is an associate professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University. The intent of these donations, she says, is to “deflect criticism of high drug prices. Meanwhile, they’re bankrupting the health-care system.”

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