Illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept/Getty
In recent weeks, investment bankers have pressed health care companies on the front lines of fighting the novel coronavirus, including drug firms developing experimental treatments and medical supply firms, to consider ways that they can profit from the crisis.
The media has mostly focused on individuals who have taken advantage of the market for now-scarce medical and hygiene supplies to hoard masks and hand sanitizer and resell them at higher prices. But the largest voices in the health care industry stand to gain from billions of dollars in emergency spending on the pandemic, as do the bankers and investors who invest in health care companies.
Over the past few weeks, investment bankers have been candid on investor calls and during health care conferences about the opportunity to raise drug prices. In some cases, bankers received sharp rebukes from health care executives; in others, executives joked about using the attention on Covid-19 to dodge public pressure on the opioid crisis.
Gilead Sciences, the company producing remdesivir, the most promising drug to treat […]
We should get rid of all the banks and have one “National” bank which does not profit from anything except a small amount to cover their services: call it Banking for All, just like Healthcare for All. Even Republican voters would probably go along with that idea.
PS: A Mr. Paul Hellyer from Canada who had been in the Canadian government for over 35 years and even came close to becoming their Prime Minister, told me as long as ten years ago that the USA should use a National banking system instead of the corrupt one which we now use. He is a very well respected philosopher in the world and his ideas are right on spot for our system, to change for the better, instead of the banks investing in the stock market with people’s money; but instead keeping money safely in the bank itself. I think it is the best idea I have ever heard; with a national bank printing the money as well as taking care of it. “Banking for All” is the best way for a real Democracy to work, just like “Healthcare for All” is the best way for getting profits out of our “healthcare” system; instead of a “Health for Profit” system.