It’s not one company or one team of rapacious hedge fund investors responsible for soaring drug prices.

The phenomenon is system-wide.

Sixty brand-name drugs have more than doubled in the past year. For 20 of the medications, the price has more than quadrupled. Bloomberg reports the increases based on its review of a survey of drug prices by DRX.

And just since this past December, the price for more than 400 drugs rose by at least 10 percent.

In addition to the new kids on the block of the pharmaceutical industry, such as infamous hedge fund investor Martin Shkreli, blue chip drug companies are pushing big increases.

Pfizer hiked the price of 24 of its medications by at least 12 percent. GlaxoSmithKline similarly bumped up the cost of 22 of its medications by at least 15 percent in the past two months.

As is often the case, the pharmaceutical companies argue their prices are necessary to fund their investment in new research and insist that they offer much lower prices to insurers and providers.

Read: Insurers gouging cancer patients on drug costs, ACS says

GlaxoSmithKline told Bloomberg that the price it offers insurance and provider customers actually declined.

While the jury may be out on Pfizer and GSK, a recent trove of emails made public from a Congressional investigation into price gouging by several companies responsible for particularly big price hikes, including the firm led by Shkreli, displayed indisputable evidence that profits were the key motivation behind some companies’ pricing strategy.

In one email from Shkreli reported by the New York Times, the Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO brags to colleagues that the revenue from sales of Daraprim ––the drug whose price the company had recently raised from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill –– would go almost entirely to profits.

“So 5,000 paying bottles at the new price is $375,000,000 — almost all of it is profit and I think we will get three years of that or more,” Shkreli wrote in the email.

Instant Insights /

Who's responsible for high drug prices? Not just hedge funds

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