ABSTRACT
The news in September 2015 that pharmaceutical company Turing, led by a 32-year-old hedge-fund manager, had raised the price of a 62-year-old drug from $13.50 to $750 focused public attention on price gouging in an industry in which the pursuit of wealth has trumped the improvement of health (Pollack 2015). The day after Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted that this “price gouging” was “outrageous,” the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index plunged by 4.7 percent, or $15 billion in market capitalization, in a few hours of trading. This reaction demonstrated the importance of the stock market to the fortunes that individuals can reap when pharmaceutical companies can keep drug prices high (Langreth and Armstrong 2015).
