Katie Porter Tearing Pharma CEO To Shreds Is Your Self-Care Today
This video of Rep. Katie Porter dressing down a male CEO will clear your skin and add 10 years to your life
In case you’re not familiar with California representative Katie Porter, please, pull up a seat. Because you’re going to get to know her and the flawless way she works as a legislator here in a minute. During a House Oversight Committee hearing on hyperinflated drug costs yesterday, Porter tore a Big Pharma CEO to shreds, blew him into smithereens, and all that’s left when she’s done is a bumbling pile of dust where a filthy rich white man used to be.
Basically, it’s the self-care we all need right now.
The perpetrator-turned-Porter-victim is former Celgene CEO Mark Alles. The House Oversight Committee is investigating Celgene’s Revlimid, used in cancer treatments. The Committee found that Revlimid’s price has been raised 23 times since 2005, when it cost $215 per pill. It now costs $763. FOR A SINGLE PILL.
You know who does a really good job of explaining the staggering, mind-blowingly awful reasons for this? Katie Porter. Allow Rep. Porter and her whiteboard to show you how it’s done.
She points out that the reason the prices spiked so much is not due to research and development, but because Big Pharma executives like to be really, really rich. They accomplish this by meeting profit goals, which allows them to collect big, fat, half-million-dollar bonuses.
After getting Alles to admit the company did not adjust the formula or find more patients to receive the drug (which would account for some increase in price), she and her whiteboard filleted Alles like a fish. She wrote the number “$13 million” down and really went for it.
Porter: “Do you know what this number is? Does it ring any bells?”
Alles: “Er…maybe…my compensation in some way…” (That was, in fact, his salary in 2017.)
Porter: “That’s 200 times the average American income, and 360 times the average senior’s Social Security Payment.”
Porter confirms that Alles’s salary was so disgustingly huge because Celgene hit its annual earning targets, which allowed him to collect his half-million-dollar bonus. The company hit its annual earning targets because Alles and Celgene tripled the price of Revlimid.
“So, to recap here, the drug didn’t get any better; the cancer patients didn’t get any better; you just got better at making money,” Porter concluded. “You just refined your skills at price gouging.”
Excuse me one moment, I just… yeah.
The entire internet was 100% here for Katie Porter and her research, execution, delivery, and overall domination of this very bad man. The cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. is nothing short of a crime, and we need politicians like Porter to continue to hold them accountable for robbing Americans blind when we need medicine to, you know, not die.
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/13113858533113077766
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/1311393910577532930
Basically, Katie Porter obliterating men who create and uphold a greedy, capitalist system that further disenfranchises poor people is the new ASMR. Gonna be playing this one on repeat to self-soothe all day.
