Big Pharma corporations are killing and bankrupting Americans for profit. They charge us outrageous prices for life-saving and sustaining medications, far more than in other wealthy countries. Even worse? These medications were developed with our public taxpayer dollars! That was one opening in a recent story online about the pharma industry. While information like this tends to be extreme, people think what THEY want to think.

Chutzpah. It’s the only way to describe Merck’s plan to sue the government over the plan to negotiate drug prices, saying it is unconstitutional. Merck said in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that Medicare’s drug-price negotiation program violated the company’s First and Fifth Amendment rights. This is a prime example of what’s wrong with pharma.

Horizon’s CEO, Tim Walbert, will reportedly get around $135 million when the company is sold to Amgen. He has mastered a particular kind of industry expertise: taking drugs invented and tested by other people, wrapping them expertly in hard-nosed marketing and warm-hued patient relations, raising their prices, and enjoying astounding revenues without spending one dime on drug development.

Patient advocates on Tuesday blasted the Biden administration’s refusal to compel the manufacturer of a lifesaving prostate cancer drug developed entirely with public funds to lower its nearly $190,000 annual price tag. The drug’s development was 100% taxpayer-funded. Yet a one-year supply of Xtandi currently costs $189,800 in the United States.