How charitable giving is profitable to the pharmaceutical industry

Drug companies won’t support charities if they can’t be sure they’re also helping themselves…

How Big Pharma Uses Charity Programs to Cover for Drug Price Hikes, bloomberg, May 19, 2016.

A billion-dollar system in which charitable giving is profitable for Big Pharma…
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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. “…

…Continue reading: How Big Pharma Uses Charity Programs to Cover for Drug Price Hikes, bloomberg, May 19, 2016.

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