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Re:Congressman calls for probe into Valeant’s pricing of lea... by wodencafe on Sunday October 23, 2016 @10:06AM (#12773602)
How can you justify a 2,700% price increase in 2 years?
Re:Congressman calls for probe into Valeant’s pricing of lea... by refurb on Sunday October 23, 2016 @01:13PM (#12774360)
Here is a possible scenario (not saying it applies here)...

There are substantial fixed costs for manufacturing a drug. The more volume you sell, the lower the total cost per unit since fixed costs get spread across a greater number of units.

As volume drops, profitability eventually goes negative, so the price needs to rise for that drug to stay on the market.

Re:Congressman calls for probe into Valeant’s pricing of lea... by maxerickson on Sunday October 23, 2016 @10:33AM (#12773720)
It's at least possible that the pricing set by the previous owner of the production line was altruistic.

This would be a much more interesting discussion if we had access to the actual costs involved, but alas.

Re:Congressman calls for probe into Valeant’s pricing of lea... by daodedickinson on Sunday October 23, 2016 @02:05PM (#12774610)
Well, that's not much more than the price increase in my health insurance over the past 4-5 years. One part you can call greed, but the other part is that price control attempts unique to the health care industry cause all sorts costs to be shifted into not-logically-related places. On top of that, more and more in the US you have people successfully illegally buying their prescriptions online or legally getting them from fewer peaks of the long-tail distribution. The big cost for a pharmacy is labor and their only place to recoup costs is marking up prescription costs so I have seen them make the decision to up prices to try to avoid laying off people due to sales lost to economic centralization. I wouldn't be surprised that the company in OPs post simply has a far less profitable business and this is one of the few paths they see to keeping their business and employees afloat.