Spending Seven Years "Away..." Means Martin Shkreli's Narrative Hasn't Aged... Very Well.

This is more or less a Sunday evening trivia installment (from another property), but since we covered Hassan closely here for years, and Mr. Shkreli was explaining (in the guise of "Enrique", on Twitter), to an acolyte, that drug costs are not a problem, we felt it belonged. . . here.

While it remains true that prescription drugs are largely paid for by insurers and state and federal government programs, all that means is that the actual "out of pocket" has been shrinking for many Americans. It does NOT mean that spending overall on drugs, by all payers has declined -- in fact, the overall price of such drugs is up close to 15 per cent, year over year.

True enough, as the graphic at right shows (original data here). . . COVID has distorted spending at the federal level. But all that does is make Shkreli's narrative even less true. The vast bulk of the spending was for vaccines (drugs), and hospitalizations (again, the largest chunk of US spending is now in hospital stays -- especially for-profit hospitals).

But even ignoring COVID-19, US doctors have been taking a decreasing share of the pie since at least 2004. I know. I've represented many a doctors' practice group in sales negotiations -- and this is a simple fact. They still make about 30 per cent more than their EU counterparts as a group, but they are not the villains that Martin's uber mentor, Fred Hassan (while CEO at Schering-Plough, and gouging patients for what Yale's Dr. Harlan Krumholtz, MD, a cardiologist, called "a very expensive placebo") made them out to be.

"Fast Fred" Hassan just needed to deflect from the awful cost of Vytorin, and doctors became his target. Martin lapped it up, without questioning, from about 2006 to 2012.

Then he started committing outright crimes, and we know how that turned out.

But to the extent Martin's story was ever even partially true, it was in the first Bush 43 term -- from 2000 to 2004.

In sum -- Martin's supposed gray-beard "knowledge" is. . . all about buggy whips -- in an age of space-stations, and fully-automated, robotic Mars landers. We even have autonomous helicopters, flying tonight, on Mars. Yep -- onward, grinning. . . into the night now, with a red hot coal, rising to the south east, with a moan. . . as we think of the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.

नमस्ते