[refurb]

The issue is that Valeant's business model of buying assets and firing everyone else except sales and marketing was/is pretty attractive to Wall Street. Pharma's return on R&D investment has been horrible, so when Pearson said "we don't do R&D", it got some people pretty excited.

Regardless, that business model has been proven to be a poor strategy. Good drugs come from R&D. Can you snap up a bunch of "ok" drugs and sell them through shady techniques? Sure, but it catches up with you eventually.

Take a look at their product line.[1] Jeeze. It's either branded medication that has no real use (since you can get products that are just as good for cheaper) or brand name drugs where the generic already exists. If either a doctor or insurance company was paying attention, none of those drugs would ever be used. Maybe I'm going overboard with that statement, but it's mostly true.

Valeant never was a pharmaceutical company, it was a sales and marketing company for a bunch of low quality drugs.

[1]http://www.valeant.com/operational-expertise/valeant-united-...