Why is it not okay to raise the price to what the market (insurance companies) will pay? How else would you expect the market clearing price to be determined (Conservatives in Congress implemented legislation prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharma companies)? Every day healthcare providers are finding ways to extract as much as possible from payers (insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid); this is not illegal. Immoral? Sure, I'll bite and state it's wrong, but entirely economically rational in the current broken system. What makes Shrekli's transgressions particularly bothersome? He put the issue in the spotlight for the American public to see (with much bravado), front and center, and he's the bad guy for showing the system is broken?
What he did was entirely legal, and in no way should've impacted his fraud sentencing. But exacting revenge on a single person (through overly punitive prison sentencing) does nothing to fix systemic issues. Someone with talent that could be redirected in a positive way (his financial analysis and engineering acumen is proven) is cooling his heels in a jail cell for years, and the American healthcare system is as broken as it was before.
I've seen happen before [1], and was just as dismayed with how the person in question was treated relative to the severity of the crime(s).
> Why is it not okay to raise the price to what the market (insurance companies) will pay?
Because the health care market in the U.S. is uniquely dysfunctional at the moment. One of the reasons for this is that most people are unwilling to accept the consequences of free-market economics in the health-care market, specifically, that some people cost more to maintain than they contribute and so on a hard-nosed economic analysis they should simply be allowed to die (or euthanized). So what we have now is a system that starts with free-market rhetoric, but then applies a ton of patches and hacks so that people are insulated from free-market consequences. That just doesn't work. And part of the reason it doesn't work is that it opens the door for rent-seeers like Shkreli to move in.
> What he did was entirely legal, and in no way should've impacted his fraud sentencing.
Like I said, I am not taking a position on whether his sentence was fair or not, I just don't know. The only thing I'm taking a position on is the validity of defending Shkreli on the grounds that he was merely "raising prices on those who could pay."
What he did was entirely legal, and in no way should've impacted his fraud sentencing. But exacting revenge on a single person (through overly punitive prison sentencing) does nothing to fix systemic issues. Someone with talent that could be redirected in a positive way (his financial analysis and engineering acumen is proven) is cooling his heels in a jail cell for years, and the American healthcare system is as broken as it was before.
I've seen happen before [1], and was just as dismayed with how the person in question was treated relative to the severity of the crime(s).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Computer_hacking