A Decade Marked By Outrage Over Drug Prices
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., was in the middle of describing drug price gouging as a scheme to enrich a few industry executives at the expense of everyday patients when he stopped to reprimand a witness.
"It's not funny, Mr. Shkreli," said Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform until his death this past October, to a smirking man at the table before him. "People are dying. And they're getting sicker and sicker."
The man was Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, who was called before Cummings' committee in February 2016. After hiking the price of an old drug for parasitic infections to $750 a pill from $13.50, Shkreli became the poster boy for pharmaceutical greed that helped define the past decade.
During that time, new drugs emerged with higher price tags than ever, and many old drugs got sudden price hikes. Meanwhile, nearly 1 in 4 Americans has trouble affording prescription drugs, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll.
"Price increases that consumers have suffered under the last 10 years have been at a greater rate compared to inflation than we've ever seen in this country," says Jim Yocum, a senior vice, a health data firm.
