The chief executive of a small pharmaceutical company defended hiking the price of an essential antibiotic by more than 400 percent and told the Financial Times that he thinks “it is a moral requirement to make money when you can.”
Nirmal Mulye, CEO of the small Missouri-based drug company Nostrum Laboratories, raised the price of bottle of nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392 last month. The drug is a decades-old antibiotic used to treat urinary-tract infections caused by Escherichia coli and certain other Gram-negative bacteria. The World Health Organization lists nitrofurantoin as an essential medicine.
In an interview with the FT, Mulye went on to say it was also a “moral requirement” to “sell the product for the highest price,” and he explained that he was in “this business to make money.”
In line with this perspective, Mulye took a moment to defend Martin Shkreli, who gained notoriety for buying exclusive rights to another decades-old drug and ruthlessly raised its price by more than 5,000 percent virtually overnight. (Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison in March on unrelated fraud charges.)
Mulye explained:
I agree with Martin Shkreli that when he […]
With no control over the Pharmaceutical industry by the federal government, there is nothing to stop them from making as much money off of their products as they can. This is truly a “illness-profit” system, not a health system. We need a single payer system now, more than ever to stem the high cost of just staying alive when we are ill.
Really, it is amazing what some believe is the purpose of their short time on earth. Receiving recognition for the financial killing one has made from the sickness and death of their fellow humans is beyond my understanding. Don’t these prideful business persons realize that they are likely to sicken and certainly will die or do they imagine they can buy their way out at the end? Or more likely they don’t think about such things at all, amoral, profit is all.