--- title: Daraprim: Turing to Cut Drug Price After Backlash description: The price of Daraprim had gone from $13.50 a tablet to $750, canonical: https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/ author: Nolan Feeney article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-09-23T00:04:16.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:57:43.198Z article:section: Health og:title: Drug Company Reverses Course on Controversial Price Hike og:description: The price of Daraprim had gone from $13.50 a tablet to $750 og:url: https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Drug Company Reverses Course on Controversial Price Hike twitter:description: The price of Daraprim had gone from $13.50 a tablet to $750 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Drug Company Reverses Course on Controversial Price Hike > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=eb372ab9-c7b9-4c8e-a622-fe97b9aafd83&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs [Watch (HLS stream): Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MydyUO9f.m3u8) (3:37)  _Published 2013-02-21. Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care._  by [Nolan Feeney](https://time.com/author/nolan-feeney/)  ## Nolan Feeney Sep 23, 2015 12:04 AM UTC  by [Nolan Feeney](https://time.com/author/nolan-feeney/)  ## Nolan Feeney Sep 23, 2015 12:04 AM UTC A pharmaceuticals company that raised the price of a drug 5,500% practically overnight says it [will now lower its price](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/22/oll-back-pricing-for-daraprim-amid-controversy.html) following intense backlash. Turing Pharmaceuticals founder Martin Shkreli confirmed the price cut to NBC News on Tuesday but did not say how much the company would reduce the cost of Daraprim. Early this week, Turing’s decision to raise the price of Daraprim from $13.50 a tablet to $750 was the subject of a [New York _Times_ story](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight-increase-in-a-drugs-price-raises-protests.html). The drug, which is generically known as pyrimethamine and was acquired by the company acquired in August, is used to treat a serious parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis, which can be life-threatening for those with compromised immune systems. It’s also been used to treat malaria. Shkreli said the new price will allow the company to break even or make a “small profit” on the drug. \[[_NBC News_](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/22/oll-back-pricing-for-daraprim-amid-controversy.html)\] ## Transcript [00:00] [ MUSIC ] [00:04] This is not a free market. You don't get health care [00:08] because you want it. You don't wake up in the morning [00:10] and say, gee, I'd love to go down to the emergency [00:13] room today. You enter that market unwillingly. You [00:16] know nothing about the products that you're being [00:18] asked to buy in the market. You have no choice of [00:20] those products. [ MUSIC ] [00:25] Hi. I'm Steve Brill, I've got the cover story this week in [00:28] TIME magazine, looking at the healthcare debate from [00:32] a very different perspective. Everybody focuses on who [00:36] should pay for the exorbitant cost of healthcare. And [00:40] what I decided to do, was ask the more fundamental [00:43] question which is, why does healthcare cost so much? I [00:47] looked behind eight bills and traced the bills [00:52] all the way back to who's getting what money, who's [00:54] making what profits, and the results are are really [00:58] surprising. One of the things I found that that [01:02] everybody in the healthcare industry knows about but [01:05] that nobody else knows about, is something called the [01:07] charge master. And the charge master is a, an eternal [01:10] list in each hospital of the thousands of different items [01:14] that they charge for and nobody could explain it to me [01:19] and indeed, it would be hard to explain. For example, [01:21] why would you charge a $ 77 for a box of gauze [01:25] pads that you can buy for a dollar at the local drug [01:28] store? Why would you charge, you know, thousands of [01:32] dollars for a CAT scan that really doesn't cost you [01:35] anything? And it's emblematic, if you will. Of [01:39] the irrationality of the entire healthcare system [01:43] because no one can explain the cost. No one even tries [01:46] to explain the cost and the only people who are [01:49] guaranteed sure fire to pay, to be asked to pay the [01:52] charge master prices are the poorest people who [01:57] don't have health insurance. The real profit makers are [02:01] the way hospitals mark up the very expensive drugs [02:04] that you get, you know, if you have cancer, if you have [02:07] pneumonia. You know they're making thousands of [02:10] dollars on these drugs and the drug companies in turn [02:13] are making still more thousands of dollars. Obamacare [02:17] does very little. To solve any of these problems which [02:21] is probably why it got through Congress. It doesn't do [02:24] anything to control the prices of our prescription drugs [02:29] or medical devices you know, such as a CAT scan. In [02:32] fact if anything, it will increase the profits of all the [02:35] players in the market. By making sure that more [02:38] people have insurance and therefore more people are [02:42] in the marketplace with the funds you know, from [02:45] insurance companies to buy all these products. [02:48] Insurance companies are not really the pre the [02:50] problem there. They're run pretty terribly it's basically [02:53] sort of a ho hum business where you know, they [02:55] process claims, a lot of us think they process claims [02:59] unfairly or you know, inconsistently. But, they are [03:03] increasingly at the mercy of hospitals, which are [03:06] consolidating buying up doctors' practices. We should [03:10] tax profits on so- called nonprofit hospitals and put [03:14] that money back into the system. We should control the [03:18] prices of the prescription drugs, because if I have a [03:21] monopoly on a cancer wonder drug. Then [03:26] I can charge anything I want for it. That's obviously not [03:29] a free market, and it's gonna lead to the kinds of [03:31] abuses that you see in this article, once you follow the [03:35] money. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/"},"headline":"Drug Company Reverses Course on Controversial Price Hike","datePublished":"2015-09-23T00:04:16.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:57:43.198Z","description":"The price of Daraprim had gone from $13.50 a tablet to $750","url":"https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/","keywords":["medicine"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Nolan Feeney","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/nolan-feeney/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/tag/medicine/","name":"medicine"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/","name":"Drug Company Reverses Course on Controversial Price Hike"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs","description":"Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MydyUO9f/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-02-21T01:00:05.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MydyUO9f.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/","duration":"PT3M37S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4045668/daraprim-price-cut/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```