2016 was not a good year for Pharma’s image. Early in the year, Martin Shkreli, founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, refused to justify the company’s price hike of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 on Capitol Hill and took the “fifth.” Months later, the drug giant Mylan raised the price of EpiPen, the emergency allergy injection, to $600 from the $100 with no warning. (After public outrage, it offered EpiPen price reductions for the poor, simply shifting the cost to other patients and taxpayers.)
Meanwhile hepatitis C drugs that cost as much as $84,000 a course of treatment continued to deplete Medicaid tax dollars. Thirty-three states gave more than $1 billion to Gilead Sciences for Sovaldi, reported National Public Radio, the massive payments only covering 2.4 percent of possible Medicaid patients.
