Corcept Therapeutics: The Company That Perfectly Explains the Health Care Crisis
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If someone wanted to use a Venn diagram to illustrate what is wrong with the U.S. health care system, picking the different sets would be easy: Price gouging, abuse of loopholes, hidden risks to patients, baffling regulatory decisions, marginal efficacies and the use of doctor payments to stimulate drug sales would be some logical choices. And a case in point would be Corcept Therapeutics, a specialty pharmaceutical company based in Menlo Park, California, and the apparent union of all things expensive and opaque. So how did Corcept, a small company with just one drug aimed at treating a tiny population of patients with a rare pituitary disorder, wind up there? Corcept has managed to make handsome profits by quietly yet efficiently exploiting gaps in the nation’s health care regulatory framework. And its sole drug is none other than the storied mifepristone, better known as the abortion pill.