Meet Martin Shkreli.

He's kind of like the realDonaldTrump of pharmaceutical executives, except Donald Trump is probably the more humane of the two, as he would call for raising taxes on this former hedge fund manager's income.

@JohnCFierce You are such a moron. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) September 20, 2015

See what I mean?

Anyway, Shkreli is the founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up pharmaceutical company he recently created after a stint in his 20s as a hedge fund manager who shorted the stocks of pharmaceutical companies, and then tried to insert himself in the Food and Drug Administration's approval process when drugs made by the companies he was shorting were being considered for approval.



This is not the first time the 32-year-old Mr. Shkreli, who has a reputation for both brilliance and brashness, has been the center of controversy. He started MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company, in his 20s and drew attention for urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.

Critics, of course, called for the Department of Justice to investigate his immoral and unethical behavior, but, of course, as with most powerful hedge fund millionaires, he was never held accountable for his despicable behavior.

So, off Skhreli went to found a "start-up," Turing, which basically buys up old drugs (often generics that have been around for ages) and raises the price of them to astronomical levels, all the while making vague promises that the windfall profits will finance new "research" for "better drugs." Recently, he chose to raise the price of a drug a lot of folks with HIV depend upon when they get sick with infections due their weakened immune systems.



Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection. The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars. “What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”

Now, you are probably wondering, why do our leaders let profiteers like Shkreli get way with this nonsense? The answer is that we are the only major country in the world that does not negotiate drug prices for all of our people. In Italy or France or Canada or Denmark or Germany, the government sits down with drug companies and says, "we will only pay you this much money for your drug in our country. Take it or leave it!" In the United States, Medicare -- our single-payer program for those 65 and older who consume the majority of drugs in this country -- is legally barred from negotiating lower drug prices. The American taxpayers must literally pay the price that Turing or Pfizer or any other drug company demands. It's blackmail. It's extortion.

So, how do we fix things? The only solution is to allow the United States Government to negotiate drug prices on behalf of all 320 million Americans, most likely through the framework of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system.

Bernie Sanders gets this. First, he knows we have a problem. He has been investigating high drug prices his entire career. He even used to drive women with cancer to Canada to buy drugs with cheaper prices negotiated by the Canadian Government.



In August, two members of Congress investigating generic drug price increases wrote to Valeant Pharmaceuticals after that company acquired two heart drugs, Isuprel and Nitropress, from Marathon Pharmaceuticals and promptly raised their prices by 525 percent and 212 percent respectively. Marathon itself had acquired the drugs from another company in 2013 and had quintupled their prices, according to the lawmakers, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland.

Today, people are walking into drug stores and finding that the prices of the medicine they've been using for years has gone up by 30-50%. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 15, 2015

He has been speaking out about this problem -- clearly and explicitly -- throughout the campaign thus far.

Second, he has a solution -- replace thousands of different private health insurance plans hopelessly "negotiating" with giant pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices with one strong, robust single-payer.

Let me be clear: there is no Hillary Clinton-classic-Democratic Party-style kludge to punish the Shkreli-style greed.

Indeed, Shkreli's company is very careful to provide free drugs -- and highly-discounted drugs -- to low-income patients. Shrkeli isn't in the business of ripping off individual sick people (well, he kind of is...), but is in the much-larger business of ripping off the United States Government, and the taxpayers who finance that government.



But Dr. Rima McLeod, medical director of the toxoplasmosis center at the University of Chicago, said that Turing had been good about delivering drugs quickly to patients, sometimes without charge. ... But private insurers, Medicare and hospitalized patients would have to pay closer to the list price.

Who pays the taxes that finance Affordable Care Act subsidies for private plans? You do. Who pays the taxes that finance Medicare? You do.

Shkreli is engaging in horrific extortion of the United States Government. The only way to put a stop to this greed is to empower a single-payer -- on behalf of all Americans -- to negotiate lower drug prices.

Bernie Sanders has a plan -- Medicare-for-all -- that would discipline pharmaceutical company greed while expanding coverage to all Americans. Hillary Clinton, however, still can't even tell us how she will cover 100-percent of Americans.

Men (and women) like Shkreli "don't play" when it comes to ripping off and exploiting taxpayers and the United States Government. We need a president who won't play around either.

Shkreli's greed is disgusting. The greed of pharmaceutical companies that buy cheap drugs and then raise the prices of them -- the most vicious form of rent-seeking -- is unimaginably immoral.

When I'm choosing between Bernie or Hillary, I know Bernie won't play.