23 September 2015 - If Charles Dickens were writing today and seeking a life model for one of his villains, he’d be pleased to find Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager who, upon acquiring the rights to a critical drug for patients with life-threatening infections, raised its price to $750 from $13.50 per tablet.

We cannot count on drug companies to make necessary medicines affordable or count on them to develop the drugs we most need.
But the problem we face is less this particular individual than the fact that we’re imposing a market structure on something that should be a public good. We wouldn’t squirm watching this guy try to explain himself if he were selling yachts or high-end real estate.

The challenge is finding the public policies that will take pharmaceuticals from what any objective person would view as a highly distorted market — prices don’t rise 5,500 percent overnight in a functioning market — to a more rational one.

For more details, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/09/23/should-the-government-impose-drug-price-controls/drug-price-controls-are-vital-in-a-market-thats-not-free