I've mentioned this before, but just to be clear, everyone knows that what Martin Shkreli did with the price of that AIDS drug is not at all a new or recent phenomenon, right? The percentage of the price increase may not always have been quite as drastic, but pharmaceutical companies have been buying the patents to drugs and jacking the prices up exponentially for a long time now. Not only are the prices dramatically increased when a patent is taken over by a new company, but price increases are also used to offset the losses from decreases in demand that tend to happen when, you know, drugs do their job and make people better. The conditions that allow drug companies to reap windfall profits from insane price increases was one of the driving forces behind the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
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Perhaps you've read about it in emails from your racist relatives.
Historically, Medicare hasn't been allowed to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers. Be it $13.50 or $750, if the drug company says that's what they pay, then that's what they pay. Democrats have long wanted to put an end to this, but Obama's promise that profits would stay intact is what ultimately led the pharmaceutical industry to invest millions into ads supporting Obamacare. It's been estimated that the industry stands to make as much as $35 billion in additional profits as a result of the law.
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