$750 For A Life-Saving Pill? Tell Congress: No More Pharmaceutical Monopolies!

Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli sparked outrage when he jacked up the price of Daraprim, a 62-year-old medicine used to treat toxoplasmosis in HIV patients, from $13.50 to $750 a tablet - amounting to a 5,000% increase.

Shkreli recently caved under public outcry, and announced he will lower the price of the drug (though he hasn't given a specific number).

But there's a bigger issue at play -- our current regulatory system allows opportunistic CEOs to corner patients into paying ridiculous sums for life-saving treatments.

Here's how it's supposed to work: A company that puts money, time and research into creating new drugs is given a patent monopoly on the drug as a type of reward for the risk undertaken. The patent eventually expires, allowing competitors to enter the market and sell generic forms of the drug, lowering prices all around.

Here's how it really works: Instead of taking on the risk of putting resources into discovering new drugs, companies like Shkreli's buy up existing obscure, generic drugs. The FDA then grants these companies market exclusivity for taking “grandfathered” compounds into compliance with current regulations. This grants pharmaceutical companies a monopoly on certain drugs, allowing them to arbitrarily and unfairly charge exorbitant amounts for life-saving medication. In addition, many of these companies have purchased marketing and tradmark rights to the drugs, giving them the benefit of controlled distribution: these companies can keep the drug out of competitors' hands so they can't develop generics.

No company should be able to use the regulatory system to gain a monopoly on life-saving drugs. Please sign the petition to ask Congress to revisit policies that allow pharmaceutical companies to obtain a monopoly and to make generic and imported drugs more available.