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ID Number 1097244

Cyber Security Major

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"CEO: 5,000-percent drug price hike 'not excessive at all'". cbsnews.com, CBS  Interactive Inc., September 22, 2015. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/turing-pharmaceuticals-ceo-martin-shkreli-defends-5000-percent-price-hike-on-daraprim-drug/>.  Accessed 28 September 2020.

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By artificially hiking up the prices of lifesaving drugs, often times without reason, CEOs deny the human dignity of their customers by excluding them from a market necessary to their survival or, at best, forcing them to scrounge up their savings just to afford their medicine.

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Related to the point above, the poor and vulnerable are nudged aside by these practices for profit gains. According to the article, before these drug price hikes, it already took around $1,000 dollars for patients to afford treatment, and this skyrocketed to an exorbitant 60,000 dollars after the tax hike.

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Ideally, the solution would be to allow the prices of the free market to determine the price of drugs and have the government impose penalties on those that inflate such prices. However, this isn't always feasible due to the monopolistic nature of pharmaceutical companies.

Therefore, I have three alternative solutions as listed below:
1. Having the government limit prices and profit margins on drugs without allowing the free market to synthesize a price first.
2. Having the government break up monopolistic pharmaceutical companies into smaller entities.
3. Having the government produce drugs as quasi public goods, which will make them much more affordable for citizens.

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Two graphs demonstrating the monopolistic and price gouging nature of pharmaceutical companies (click to zoom in):

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Two graphs demonstrating the monopolistic and price gouging nature of pharmaceutical companies (click to zoom in):