Dec. 24--Prescription drug prices, always a hot-button issue, reached the boiling point this year after several small pharmaceutical companies bought the rights to established lifesaving drugs and jacked up prices by huge margins.
The poster child for pharmaceutical greed, Martin Shkreli, captured the nation's attention as a calculating, grinning villain who acquired the rights to Daraprim, a half-century-old drug that treats patients suffering from deadly parasites, and raised the price overnight by about 5,000 percent.
Then Shkreli's story took another turn. He resigned as CEO of Turing and was ousted as CEO of another small drugmaker, KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, after being arrested earlier this month on charges that he misled investors in a hedge fund and used stock at another company to cover the losses.
Those actions followed an uproar by doctors, patient advocates, drug industry critics and politicians, who said Turing was pushing the drug's price beyond the means of desperate patients.
But it wasn't just one rogue actor raising prices and causing a furor.
Another small drugmaker, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, based in Canada, raised the price of two lifesaving heart drugs by 500 percent and 200 percent, respectively. That move was met by such a large outcry that Valeant later said it would lower prices on some drugs next year through an agreement with Deerfield-based Walgreens, the nation's largest pharmacy retailer. The move would cut prices by 10 percent on all skin and eye medicines, and by more than 50 percent on some other branded drugs that have generics available.
