Thursday’s arrest of pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has fueled the public outrage over steep drug prices, putting more pressure on Republicans to examine the issue.
The 32-year-old CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals has been widely criticized since announcing over the summer that he was raising the price of an old, lifesaving anti-parasite drug by 5,000 percent. But the public outcry against him reached a fever pitch Thursday, soon after the hoodie-cloaked Shkreli was hauled off from his Manhattan home by the FBI on charges of securities fraud.
Within hours, his name was trending on Twitter — and not because people were writing flattering things about him.
“Martin Shkreli wasn’t a successful a-hole after all, just an a-hole,” tweeted Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman.
Many others mocked Shkreli’s arrest. “Sometimes, the world gives us an early Xmas present,” wrote comic book writer G. Willow Wilson.
“Please set Martin Shkreli’s bail at $1,000,000. Then raise it 4,000 percent,” tweeted Golf Digest editor Joel Beall, in a reference to how Shkreli massively raised the price of Daraprim.
Lawmakers have held several hearings over the last two months focused on high-cost drugs, which are significantly improving prospects for those facing serious illnesses but whose steep costs are increasingly worrying to the public.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is planning a hearing on drug prices in January, after being sharply criticized by his Democratic counterpart, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, for not focusing more on the subject.
Republicans on the panel, who have contemplated asking Shkreli to testify at the hearing, said Thursday they’re still considering him as a witness but haven’t decided whom to invite. They have been urged to do so by Democrats, who said Thursday that Shkreli’s arrest ups the ante.
“Shkreli’s arrest is even more of a reason to have him before the committee,” a Democratic staffer told the Washington Examiner.
Cummings, who has already invited Valeant executive Michael Pearson to testify at the hearing, called his GOP colleagues “disgraceful” for not investigating the drug companies behind big price hikes.
“Mr. Shkreli has lined his own pockets at the expense of patients who desperately need their medications, and he should be ashamed of himself,” Cummings said Thursday in a statement provided to the Examiner.
“Given this latest development, it’s disgraceful that House Republicans have refused our multiple requests over the past year to send Mr. Shkreli even a single letter requesting a single document about his outrageous abuses,” Cummings said.
The charges Shkreli are facing don’t have anything to do with his decision to raise the price of one Daraprim pill from $13.50 to $750. Instead, the indictment focuses on Shkreli’s time at MSMB Capital, a New York hedge fund, and his time as the CEO of another biotechnology firm called Retrophin.
But given Shkreli’s reputation for self-platitudes on Twitter and the 80-plus hours he has streamed on YouTube of his daily routine, any big news about the man dubbed “the most hated man in healthcare” is bound to incite public indignation about his moves as Turing’s CEO.
“If you’re in the news for doing something wrong, people get you for anything you do,” said Gerard Anderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “So you gotta be super clean if you’re going to do something like raise prices by 4,000 or 5,000 percent.”
“He was already one of the most hated men in the country,” said John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care.
At the same time, the public obsession with Shkreli and other executives who charge high prices for drugs used by a relatively narrow population worries some healthcare advocates. They worry it could take the focus off the high price of more widely used medications, like the new Solvadi drug that treats hepatitis C.
“Those blockbuster drugs with very aggressive pricing threaten the sustainability of our entire health insurance system,” Rother said.
