Posted on 08/25/2016 12:28:27 PM PDT by amorphous
Makers of the EpiPen auto-injector said they would offer a 50 percent discount after public outrage over a 500-percent price hike. Hillary Clinton was among those calling for the price reduction – and her supporters were quick to give her all the credit.
EpiPen administers a quick dose of epinephrine to counter a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis. The easy-to-use injector is made by West Virginia-based Mylan Pharmaceuticals, which bought the rights to it in 2007. Since then, the price of the EpiPen has skyrocketed, going from $100 to $600.
On Thursday, Reuters seemed to give Clinton the bulk of the credit for Mylan’s decision. The pro-Clinton advocacy group Correct the Record called the pharmaceutical company’s surrender an example of Hillary being a “progressive who gets things done.”
As the price of EpiPens rose, so did the company’s stock price, going from $13.29 a share in 2007 to a high of $47.59 this year. Bresch also saw her compensation go up 671 percent in the same time period, from $2.4 million to $18.9 million, NBC News reported.
Increased scrutiny of the company over the past few days has revealed that Bresch is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and that Mylan has been a donor to the Clinton Foundation. The company’s political outreach led to a 2013 law encouraging the use of EpiPens in schools around the US, leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill.
Mylan’s decision to offer a 50 percent discount follows the playbook of Martin Shkreli’s Turing Pharmaceuticals, which discounted the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim to $375 per pill after last year’s outrage over price hikes. Doctors have pointed out that the new price is still 2,500 percent more than Daraprim, which is prescribed to AIDS and cancer patients, used to cost before its acquisition by Shkreli.
That’s not an epi-pen, but rather an epinephrine syringe used for cardiac arrest, it’s a larger dose of the same drug.
Your point stands though, it’s old technology, and there is no reason that someone couldn’t come up with a $10 epi-pen. No reason that is, except for banning imports, and the FDA restricting the competition.
Washington criminal conduct has no limits.
Sorry, Hillary. The feds are to blame for Mylan’s EpiPen monopoly.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/anaphylactic-political-shock-1472078239?mod=wsj_review_&_outlook
Approving a generic copy that is biologically equivalent to a branded drug is simple, but the FDA maintains no clear and consistent principles for generic drug-delivery devices like auto injectors or asthma inhalers. How does a company prove that a generic device is the same as the original product if there are notional differences, even if the differences don’t matter to the end result? In this case, that means immediately injecting a kid in anaphylactic shock with epinephrine—which is not complex medical engineering.
But no company has been able to do so to the FDA’s satisfaction. Last year Sanofi withdrew an EpiPen rival called Auvi-Q that was introduced in 2013, after merely 26 cases in which the device malfunctioned and delivered an inaccurate dose. Though the recall was voluntary and the FDA process is not transparent, such extraordinary actions are never done without agency involvement. This suggests a regulatory motive other than patient safety.
Then in February the FDA rejected Teva’s generic EpiPen application. In June the FDA required a San Diego-based company called Adamis to expand patient trials and reliability studies for still another auto-injector rival.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-25/epipen-demonium-drags-stocks-worst-drop-brexit
Remember that the EpiPen cost $4.95 in 2000. Going up to $600 and then giving a discount (if you qualify) is still a big rip off! A 50% discount is an insult. This is what you get from Democrats.
Bragging about a smaller rip off is disingenuous. A 98% discount makes more sense.
Today the EpiPen should cost no more than $9.95 in my opinion. Where are the government agencies that are supposed to help keep prices reasonable?
BIG DEAL !
That still leaves the cost at 250% of the old price.
So they originally wanted a 2X price increase, and instead they went 4X, there was “outrage”, and Hillary saves the day for the children by DEMANDING a 50% price cut back to where the EpiPen company wanted in the first place.
We now must ignore the facts that show FedGov killed off the competition and mandated prescribing 2 at a time and mandated that schools must purchase them and that they donated lots of money to CGI and the CEO’s dad is a senator.
You wonder where our Congress and Senate ‘watchdogs’ are, they’re all in hiding, hoping their own corruption isn’t outed...
50% discount on a 500% price hike is still a 250% price hike.
Do they expect a thanks for raising prices 2 1/2 times?
EXACTAMUNDO..
Yummy reference.
Unfortunately I cannot stand the smell of canned tuna.
I could never do Huma’s job.
I’m sure they will also offer refunds to those who got ripped off?
Hillary?
Oh double damn, Slow Joe’s daughter is going to take a pay cut for sure .... down a million or so!
She and the Entire Board of Directors, All officers and Executives should have Already been IN THE LOCKUP WITH ORANGE JUMPSUITS, ALL ASSETS Should have been Seized Already and they should ALL be facing LIFE IN PRISON.
Try Googling ALCOA and see what the GOVERNMENT did to them 40 some odd years ago! THEY WENT TO PRISON for FARE LESS!!!
You can buy these over the counter virtually anywhere in Europe for about $20 each.
it is blatantly illegal under 15 USC, with a ten year per count felony prison term, to attempt to monopolize, restrain trade or price-fix. Therefore it is only because of the explicit, intentional and outrageous conduct of your own government that you are getting raped like this on a literal daily basis, and this issue, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out is not limited to EpiPens — in fact, Mylan has raised prices on dozens of off-patent, generic medications by about the same 500% in the last few years and the only reason they get away with any of it is the above use of government force.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231480
I found her performance fascinating on a number of levels.
The first is as a representative of one of the lower strata of the “elite”: a bright average woman who is has parlayed deception (for example, fabricating a bogus MBA on her resume), political and family connections and an understanding of the political process into a truly toxic brew of legislated requirements that mandate purchase of her company’s products, a completely mercenary view of her “responsibilities” to her stockholders and a sense of personal entitlement (and the requisite salary to match her modest “success”) into an well-paid position as a CEO at a company in one of the most mercenary industries in the world.
I don’t think she’s “evil”. I think - based on the interviews - that she has just utterly lost her moral compass; that living in a world where she sees people even less competent than herself receiving rewards greater than her own, sees no reason not to suppose that she deserves at least what they’ve got, and that pretty much anything which is not accompanied by the likelihood of a jail sentence is a reasonable act if it furthers that goal.
There millions like her, some a little better, some a little worse, imitating the moral standards and modus operandi of the bigger fish further up the food chain.
She just happens to be in an industry in the midst of a feeding frenzy, somebody posted the ugly details, and the luck of the draw was that this was the account that happened become the outrage of the week.
The second is how utterly out of her league and clueless she is, the contrast with a similar performance by a well coached and rehearsed CEO from a large organization was a revelation of thoughtless incompetence.
“What I legislated was...”.
John Cleese might have created her (was he a true sadist) as the hapless dimwit corporate hack in one of his training videos, and I expect her performance will become a long-term source of material for communications consultants in search of a truly Epic fail.
But what struck me most of all was the avant le déluge nature of some of her comments: for example that pharmaceutical pricing is a bubble similar to the one recently seen in real estate, or that we are somewhere near the “inflection point” in consumer tolerance for the opacity and unpredictability of pricing when consumers walk into a pharmacy.
I assume that what I’m hearing is a cocktail chatter of people in her position: the system is broken, this should long since have been reflected in political reality, it’s not, and no one knows one knows how long the current state of affairs can continue.
But in the meantime it’s every man for himself and God against all, with no quarter given to the retail purchasers of EpiPens, and be careful to point out all the other participants in the food chain who are snarfing down the chum with equal gusto.
I couldn’t help feeling that I was standing, a drink in hand, at the opening reception for convention of Tax Factors for the Ferme générale: the peasants are uneasy, the future uncertain, but the event is being held in such a *nice* hotel - and after all, the precipitants work *hard* to collect those taxes, and so little of it, after all, goes to themselves.
Why don’t you start a company selling these drugs cheaper?
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