Price gouging of US consumers by drug companies so that they can make enormous profits off patients so that they can pay their executive massive salaries and inflate their stock prices is a well-known scandal. Yet another example involves a drug known as Revlimid, marketed by a company Celgene to treat the bone cancer known as multiple myeloma.
When David Armstrong was diagnosed in 2023 with this disease, he began a quest to find out why a drug capsule taken daily that costs just 25 cents to make is sold for nearly $1,000. What he found is a tale of disgusting greed and cynicism by the people who run these companies, who kept raising the price over and over again, 26 times in all over the years, just because they can, uncaring about what it did to people desperately trying to live.
That steep tab has put the drug’s lifesaving potential out of reach for some cancer patients, who have been forced into debt or simply stopped taking the drug. The price also helps fuel our ballooning insurance premiums.
They also bought off doctors.
In 2005, Celgene received reports that Los Angeles oncologist Dr. James Berenson was “bashing” Revlimid in presentations sponsored by patient groups.
In one email, a senior company official said, “it is time for us to take Jimbo to the wood shed.” The company discussed a range of options for dealing with the doctor, from taking legal action to arranging a sit-down with Celgene’s chief executive.
Ultimately, the company appears to have decided on a friendlier course of action. Berenson became a frequent paid speaker and consultant for the company, with payments totaling at least $333,000, according to Celgene disclosures. Berenson declined to comment.
He wasn’t the only doctor the company befriended. Payment records show that between 2013 and 2018, Celgene paid doctors $11 million for speaking engagements and consulting work related to Revlimid. At one point, Celgene rented a suite at the Houston Astros baseball stadium to throw a party for the entire multiple myeloma department at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, according to court testimony. The center said it was unable to verify any of those details.
And of course, the company paid its executives well too.
By increasing the price of Revlimid, Celgene executives in several instances boosted their pay. That’s because bonuses were tied to meeting revenue and earnings targets. In some years, executives would not have hit those targets without the Revlimid price increases, a congressional investigation later found.
In total, Celgene paid a handful of top executives about a half-billion dollars in the 12 years after Revlimid was approved.
Robert Hugin, who worked as Celgene’s CEO and then executive chairman, received $51 million in total compensation from 2015 to 2017. Hugin retired in 2018 to launch an unsuccessful Senate bid.
I hate to read these kinds of articles because they make me not just livid but also makes me despair about the lack of humanity of the people who run these companies. How do these people sleep at night?
Presumably they will then try to sell you an overpriced drug to cool the blood too.
“On a Mattress Firm mattress.” /s
it’ll make your hat turn green and grow an L on it, beware
“How do these people sleep at night?”
Comfortably and smugly, I imagine.
They wouldn’t be in their positions were they not greedy amoral sociopaths.
The people who complain about this issue are also usually very pro intellectual monopoly laws. Are you?
Remove the monopoly laws and this issue will go away virtually overnight.
American capitalism is founded upon the exploitation of human suffering
@5 If you remove intellectual property rights (patents in this instance) you need to find another means of financing drug development or the issue will go away because there are no new drugs to overcharge on. Other models of drug development than for profit are conceivable, but I fear that they have their failure modes as well. For example if drug development was done by the government you might be seeing the current administration stopping trials left right and centre.
In this particular case toughening up laws against anti-competitive practices (the imposition of barriers against the development of generics) would have shortened the duration of the problem. And one could look into anti-price-gouging laws.
There’s a legal maxim that “hard cases make bad law”. Overturning the drug IPR regime, instead of a more narrowly targeted legislative/regulatory response, because of this case might be an example of the maxim.
And a few minutes later I stumbled across this
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-veterans-affairs-budget-staff-cuts-jeopardize-cancer-research
Too many amoral Corporate Executives and lawyers. Not enough Luigi Mangiones. There is no moral difference between the CEOs and their Lawyer accomplices who put increasing their obscene wealth above the lives of their customers and a professional Hitman.
@7 you’ve bought into the narrative of the monopolists. This is of course normal, and the fix for it is more data and knowledge. See chapter 9 of http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm to update your mental model.
i am very much in favor of massive revision to ip law -- bare minimum i don’t think you should be able to patent medicine. they can get money from manufacturing and distributing it. should r&d even be on a profit model, or should it be 100% handled through a healthy university system funded without reservations by a government that cares about human well-being? even so, we wouldn’t have to advocate for radical change or luigism if these bandito fucklords has the slightest restraint or wisdom.
#7 another stewart
The government does (or did, since a lot of it has just been fucked with) fund the research directly, and then again indirectly, though grants to universities both for the research, and for education in general. A lot of the companies doing the price gouging on the medicines that result didn’t spend anywhere near as much on R & D, because we the people of the United States are those whom did that.
IPR is not as important for these developments as you pretend.
Furthermore, insurance companies, those big pharma companies, and their wholly captured intermediaries (apparently including doctors and legislatures) all take a cut. Then a larger cut. A larger and larger cut. Which has nothing at all to do with the development or creation of new medicines. All of this on the pretense that they and only they deserve the fruits and the profits of that research and development that was not done by them, ‘because IPR’.
Certain weather companies repackage weather data that the government creates. They make bank! They lobbied to prevent the government from repackaging this data with that money. Again: parasites under the guise of IPR. They seem to have cut off their noses to spite their face because the source of their data has been defunded….
Anyone who understands capitalism and does not hate it, does not understand the history or context of capitalism.
i am very much in favor of massive revision to ip law
Call me crazy but I have often believed that government could fairly (with appeals, etc) have a technology licensing department that purchased the rights to technologies in a lump sum, The clear threat being that a creator/inventor who preferred to make international cases in global jurisdictions, instead of selling their copyright to the government in return for an annuity or lump sum, would have to deal with the consequences. Which, would be silly. Suppose I invented an improved stealth jet engine -- the government offers me $6.5 mn for it, I say “sure!” and cash the check and head to the beach. There are other inventions that have almost insane upper values, e.g.: light emitting diodes. If someone offers me a $5mn/year annuity for the rest of my life, I’ll take it. There are others who won’t and they are welcome to try to enforce their rights against, say, Russian companies. Meanwhile, the government of ${wherever} owns a massive copyright portfolio it can trade (or not) against another economy’s total GDP.
I guess what I am saying is that governments either need to get out of the IP business (ha! ha!) or take it over and assume the risks and back them with its military might.
No problem. Trump is on the case.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/11/politics/trump-prescription-drug-prices
Not much info about how it will be done. Imposing tariffs on pharmaceutical imports is mentioned, because for Trump tariffs are a panacea.
Imback at Pharyngula forwarded this verse by Kurt Tucholsky (1922), very apt especially as habeas corpus is on the line.
“Strike! Strike!
Hit them hard!
They all flinch.
For there is no man.
There are only snipers in hiding.
Hold them fast.
Your house will burn if you let it smolder now.
Tear apart the noose of paragraphs.
Don’t fall into it.
You must succeed!
Four years of slaughter.
That is, God knows, enough.
You stand before your final breath.
Show what you are.
Judge yourself.
Die or fight!
There is no third choice.”
Part of the problem is almost certainly that, what with this being a drug for a pretty rare condition, there’s very little organized support for negotiations to keep the prices down. Drugs regularly covered by large insurance companies will have the insurance companies work to haggle down the cost for their own benefit. (Which, of course, is why single-payer setups where everybody is essentially part of the same insurance systems tend to have lower drug costs.) But something like this, the number of people who need it is low. The number of people who even know someone who needs it will be low, which means there’s not even any effective PR for it.
Rarely used drugs like this have nothing to stop the producer from gouging as much as they can get away with barring the unlikely ‘mercy’ of insurance companies. And in the U.S., where many people don’t even have insurance and the number without is soon likely to be making a spectacular increase, there’s not even that faint hope.