Drug made famous by Shkreli’s 5,000% price hike is still $750 a pill

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing, smirked his way through a Congressional hearing. (credit: CSPAN)

Disgraced ex-pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli is now behind bars, facing a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud. Yet the drug-price hike that initially thrust him into the public spotlight-and infamy-hasn't budged, according to a sobering report by Kaiser Health News.

The outlet points out that the retail price for Daraprim (pyrimethamine) is still $750 a pill, up more than 5,000 percent from its previous price of $13.50 per pill. Worse yet, it's not the only such case. In 2015 alone, more than 300 generic drugs saw prices increase by more than 100 percent.

Drug prices are "easy to raise and harder to lower, particularly if there's no competition," Nicholson Price of University of Michigan Law School told KHN.

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