Shkreli was not an outlier

BigPharma buying protection, immunity for their criminal scamming.

Follow the Money: Drugmakers Deploy Political Cash as Prices and Anger Mount

a multiple sclerosis drug whose price had soared to $34,000 a vial

This year, a critical and risky one for drug companies, the industry as a whole is ratcheting up campaign donations and its presence on Capitol Hill, a new database compiled by Kaiser Health News shows.

"The stakes are really high right now," said David Maris, who follows pharmaceutical stocks for Wells Fargo, given that President Donald Trump has joined Democrats to demand action on drug costs.

Congressional donations from pharmaceutical PACs rose 11 percent in this year's first quarter,

compared with the first three months of 2015 (the comparable point in the previous election cycle), according to a Kaiser Health News analysis. The increase accompanied a e in pharma lobbying for the period.

Contributions to powerful committee members who handle health policy matters also increased

in the face of public anger over the opioid crisis as well as anticipated renewal of legislation that determines the "user fees" companies pay for regulatory drug approval.

A dozen Republican committee heads and ranking Democrats on health-related panels collected $281,600 from pharma-related PACs in the first quarter, up 80 percent

from what people in the same positions collected in the first quarter of 2015, the data show. Such initial donations often set the pace for a two-year election cycle, and suggest whom corporate interests are trying to cultivate in a new Congress, with implied promises of more to come, analysts say.

For pharma companies, "now would be the time to give out the money, ahead of a piece of legislation that may come down the road,"

said Kent Cooper, a former Federal Election Commission official who has tracked political money for decades.

"You want to get your name out there and make a connection with these members' legislative assistants -- so you are known to them and you can get in their door."

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4...nd-anger-mount

Jus the usual corrupt oligarchy corrupting govt, and making public policy, laws, regulations, if not actually writing the ing regs and rules to be passed, implemented verbatim.