Sovaldi: Taxpayers funded drug and guess what happened

Commentary: Taxpayers funded drug and guess what happened
By Sen. Bernie Sanders Today at 7:42 a.m.

A new report from Americans for Tax Fairness explains how a pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences, games the system to charge high prices and then shifts the profits offshore to avoid billions in U.S. taxes.

Gilead sells Sovaldi, a drug used to treat the hepatitis C virus. It was developed in part with taxpayer funds by a researcher who worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs and founded a small drug company.

Gilead bought the company for $11 billion and used government-provided monopoly rights to set the sticker price at $1,000 per pill, or $84,000 for the twelve-week course of treatment in 2014.

U.S. public and private insurers, taxpayers and patients spent more money on Sovaldi in 2014 than on any other prescription drug, according to a report from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. And yet state Medicaid programs could afford to treat fewer than one in 40 patients with hepatitis C in 2014.

So taxpayers helped bankroll[ed] the research behind the hepatitis C drug, Gilead charged Americans the highest price in the world for the treatment and now we are getting cheated a third time as Gilead stashes its profits abroad to avoid taxes.

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