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| But really: Continue to gouge quietly, will ya! |
It's Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. He's the guy everybody is targeting as the brainchild of that 5000% price hike on a drug that treats an opportunistic rare illness that is usually only seen in AIDS patients. That's right, he's gouging dying people. Nice guy. He looks too young to be a CEO if you ask me. Wonder who his daddy is?
From what I learned a couple weeks ago during an HIV/AIDS in-service we had here at work, medications needed for AIDS treatment are heavily subsidized for qualified individuals (which includes most any AIDS patient who is not independently wealthy) by a federal grant through the Ryan White Foundation. So the gouge really affects everyone since the Foundation is funded by Congress with taxpayer money.
And here is how it's affected me in another way. Because of the public backlash after the news story of this price jump was diseminated by the media, public outrage has affected the stock of almost all the pharmaceticals in the US. And what was my until recently portfolio chock full of in my retirement 403b fund? That's right, pharmaceuticals. This is why I've lost so much potential earnings over the past few weeks and as you can see below, it forced me to shift the majority of my holdings into my other fund which is in more blue chip standard industries. Still profitable, but far less dynamically so than the previously heavily invested fund.
I did keep just under a thousand in that pharma fund just in case the turmoil settles and the fund regains its wildly sharp upturn again. Now of course we know the real reason for that steep rise. If it goes back to that model, I may play Sargent Shultz and faux-blindly shift funds back to ride the white horse, sweeping up some crumbs from the one percenters.