Mr. Shkreli Has "Lost The Plot," On 21st Century Drug Price Competition, In The USA...

Late last week, at some point, he tweeted from his alias account that he would "welcome competition" from "the government", in the arena of manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

He was likely referring to Gov. Newsome, and the efforts underway in California, at the state governmental level, to begin manufacturing a simple process drug -- one that has been generic for decades, at a selling-price of perhaps one-one-hundredth of what the irresponsible branded pharmacos are charging now.

That drug is. . . injectable insulin.

But what Martin has comically wrong here. . . is that it won't be competition -- in any sense.

Since the drug is generic, and all that is required is an equivalent bio-availability proof study, for the formulation as proposed by the State lab, under FDA rules (see Hatch-Waxman). . . it will be. . . REPLACEMENT, not competition.

That is, when people (like Martin, re Daraprim monopolization efforts) act irresponsibly long enough, in a highly regulated industry. . . in a way that impacts human health and access to life saving medicines. . . well, those people simply will lose the right to play.

I won't name the irresponsible branded companies' names, re insulin -- but likely Gov. Newsome just saying he will start working on California public health agencies sourcing (and perhaps making) "their own," via say Dr. Reddys labs out of India, at $2 a dose. . .

Will be enough to drop prices, system wide. There is no longer any "new" research needed in the insulin arena -- it works; full stop. So that trope -- that, is a pure canard. [And, pharma has made net profits. . . into the hundreds of billions of dollars off of insulin, over the 50 or so years it has been on market in the USA.]

So -- this was all a long-winded way of saying. . . Martin's thinking on what is happening here. . . is about a half-century out of date.

He is a dinosaur on these matters, as are the handful of companies now grossly over-charging for simple insulin.

Their times are -- like the dinosaurs, as an asteroid bigger than Manhattan struck what is now the Gulf of Mexico, near the eastern inner Mexican coast. . . at an end. Extinct.

Government manufacturing is a world-eating asteroid strike, as to those malign actors.

Out, grinning -- into a lovely evening by the lake. . . with live music, up next.

नमस्ते