Drug company buys old med, jacks price 3900%, files for bankruptcy

The drug, Aloquin, was used to treat eczema and consisted of an old generic antibiotic and extracts from aloe vera. The price went from about $250 a tube to almost $10,000 a tube. Apparently patients balked at the price and rejected the prescriptions.

Insurance plans wouldn't pay $10k for such an old medication of dubious efficacy, the company had trouble being profitable. The article states that "The filing also said that manufacturing issues, a dispute with a wholesaler, and competition from generic creams contributed to the bankruptcy."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/infamous-pharma-company-declares-bankruptcy-after-3900-price-hike/

For myself, in November I went and saw my lung doctor about a persistent cough that had been bugging me for some months. He changed one of my meds, an inhaler for asthma control (I also carry a rescue inhaler) to two nebulized meds. I had been getting the inhaler for free via mail order. The two nebulized meds were $6 each at my local pharmacy. Starting in January, one of the meds were removed from my pharmacy benefits company's formulary and replaced with a drug that became $140 at my local pharmacy - and would increase in price after 3 months!

So I was forced to get it mail order, the two drugs became $130 for a three month supply.

I don't like getting my meds mail order as by getting them locally, that money supports local jobs, not jobs in another state. We have a bad enough economy here, and it may not be much, but it's something.

Interesting coding bundle going on at Humble Bundle

There's an Intro To Code bundle from from Zenva Academy, an organization that I had never heard from before. Three tiers to the bundle, the first offers Learning Python Programming by Making a Game, Intro to Game Development, Numpy Matrices and Vectors, Learn HTML and CSS by Creating a Responsive Company Website, and The Complete Responsive Web Design Course. You get all that for $1.

For currently just under $14, you can add on VR Projects - Flying Platform Experience, Create a Road Crossing Game with Phaser 3, Create a Spanish Teaching Game with Phaser 3, Learn Angular by Creating a Web Application, Blender for Beginners - Craft Low-Poly Game Assets, Create Your First 3D Game, JavaScript Programming - Learn by Making a Mobile Game, and Beginning SQL - Store and Query Your Data.

For $25 you get the above plus Procedural Content Generation with Unity, VR Projects- 360 Photo Experience, Build a Virtual Pet Game with Phaser 3, Python Image Processing - Make Instagram-Style Filters, Create a RaspberryPi Smart Security Camera, The Complete Artificial Neural Network Course, RPG Game Development - Turn-Based Battle Systems, Audio Effects and Soundtracks in Unity Games, Data Manipulation with Pandas, The Complete Guide to Bootstrap 4, Discover jQuery - Create Interactive Websites, and Create an RPG Town with NPCs and Dialogs.

This seems to be entirely online content, I don't know if there's downloadable material once you begin one of the courses. The bundle is available for another 13 days and 20 hours from the time of this post. The current charities on offer are Girls Who Code, Code.org, and Chairty:Water. And the courses claim compatibility with Windows, Mac, and *nix.

If you have any interest in learning how to create web sites, this is an excellent source for one lousy buck. That won't even get you a cup of coffee these days!

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/intro-to-code-bundle