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US Patients Battle EpiPen Prices And Regulations By Shopping Online (cnn.com)
"The incredible increase in the cost of EpiPens, auto-injectors that can stop life-threatening emergencies caused by allergic reactions, has hit home on Capitol Hill," reports CNN. Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar reports that the argument "has now turned into civil war in the US Senate":
One senator's daughter relies on Epi-Pen, while another senator's daughter is CEO of Mylan, the single company that is licensed to sell these injectors in the US. On the worldwide market there is no monopoly on these devices... Is it finally time to allow Americans to go online and fill their prescriptions on the world market?
Time reports some patients are ordering cheaper EpiPens from Canada and other countries online, "an act that the FDA says is technically illegal and potentially dangerous." But the FDA also has "a backlog of about 4,000 generic drugs" awaiting FDA approval, reports PRI, noting that in the meantime prices have also increased for drugs treating cancer, hepatitis C, and high cholesterol. In Australia, where the drug costs just $38, one news outlet reports that the U.S. "is the only developed nation on Earth which allows pharmaceutical companies to set their own prices."
Time reports some patients are ordering cheaper EpiPens from Canada and other countries online, "an act that the FDA says is technically illegal and potentially dangerous." But the FDA also has "a backlog of about 4,000 generic drugs" awaiting FDA approval, reports PRI, noting that in the meantime prices have also increased for drugs treating cancer, hepatitis C, and high cholesterol. In Australia, where the drug costs just $38, one news outlet reports that the U.S. "is the only developed nation on Earth which allows pharmaceutical companies to set their own prices."
It should be legal to order the same product from another country. They're both made by the same company. Stupid trade protectionism.
As long as it doesn't interfere with some rich and powerful company!
Free Market, unless you want to buy medicine, then we don't let you. Funny how, in this, like so many other issues, the "conservatives" are against a free market, and the "liberals" are for the free market.
Learn to love Alaska
Current IP law has little to do with logic. Or rather, it has everything to do with logic if the objective is to maximize corporate profits, and nothing to do with logic if the objective is everybody's health.
Ban drug ad's like most developed nations do!
My Telmisartan (technically generic now, but Big Pharma is delaying it) is 6x cheaper overseas. Fuck the corporate kleptocracy and their politcal enablers with a rusty rake.
They even had a state website that pointed directly to Canadian pharmacies for several years: http://www.amednews.com/articl... . I used their list to choose my Canadian pharmacy and still use them when it makes financial sense.
Just wait for the jail / prison bill for the drugs + the cost of locking people up. as some people may trun to local jail as there last resort. also their doctors do more then the ER.
What prevents an American from buying EpiPens (or any pharmaceutical) on the international market?
Ken
Someone look up the D's and R's please. Since they were omitted I'm betting the father of the CEO is a (D).
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
This is similar to the price hike for asthma inhalers.
The excuse was to eliminate CFCs and save the ozone layer.
There is not even an attempt at government control.
And still insufficient demand for universal health care. And don't blame the politicians. With the upcoming 95% reelection rate (and 100% republican/democrat monolith), there is no incentive for them to change anything. The only issue monopolizing the media is *he who shall not be named*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Epi-pen dosage is 0.3 mg of epinephrine. One dose from a Primatene mist inhaler releases 0.22 mg of epinephrine, exactly the same active ingredient as an Epi-pen. There are over 60 doses per Primatene mist inhaler. at a cost of about 50 cents per dose. Several years ago Primatene Mist was removed from the market. Our health care system is now fully controlled by corporations that don't give a rat's ass if we live or die as long as their profits continue to skyrocket, at any cost. Health insurance companies could fight back. But they don't appear to care, as they just raise their rates to cover the excessive and escalating cost of life saving prescription drugs. Having asthma, and having worked with suppliers of delivery mechanisms during my career, I estimate the cost of goods sold per Epi-pen is about $2 to $3 each. Any figures beyond that are profit. Any higher CGS presented by Mylan, should they choose to do so, are likely accounting techniques where they move ongoing R&D costs onto old and fully paid for products. The retail price of Mylan's Epi-pen is legalized theft such that Al Capone would be proud.
Epipen has no domestic competitors because the FDA (government) says so. It can't be bought from abroad because the government (FDA) says so. The solution isn't to mandate pricing, it is to streamline the process of delivering a well understood drug (adrenaline) at a well known dose, in an exactly known situation. It would be trivial to bring generic competitors to market if this were a reasonably governed area, and there would be no price gouging allowed because they couldn't sell it at even what the price was before the jacked it up. (Adrenaline aka epinephrine is trivially cheap, and the injector is quite cheap to make as well.)
But why in the FUCK are companies being granted effective monopolies on generic drugs?!?!
Nice to know our 'representatives' don't feel the need to hide it anymore. They've been in bed with the drug companies for a long time. But seriously, this takes it to the level of Muppets-style puppetry. No one believe that Kermit is a real frog; we all know that he's got an arm buried up his backside. Do you think Congress gets a bulk discount on shoulder length calving gloves and jugs of lube?
Arguably "the same drug" will be the same everywhere, but if you're ordering online drugs from somewhere outside the FDA inspection regime, you don't know what your chances are that it's in fact actually "the same drug". Really, you don't know what you're getting.
That's still a possibility here, of course, but when a US producer commits fraud you'd better believe you'll have an army of lawyers beating down your door to help sue them into oblivion for it. Random Joe Bob's Discount Drug Shack operating in Singapore? Good luck.
Secondly, the FDA approval process itself. For better or for worse, having a complex medical trial and many layers of approval is probably better that not having it, in terms of protecting US consumers from unsafe foods and drugs. There's a fast-track process for promising drugs and devices to prevent dangerous conditions, and there registered experimental treatments, but all other things being equal, I'd prefer to know that some basic level of testing was done.
Drug IP process. People in other countries like to point out that they can purchase drugs for $20 that are charged higher processes here. You can thank us (the American Consumer) for that. Not everyone gets to be a marginal consumer.. and part of the reason we're paying full price for drugs is so that the market incentive allows those drugs to be developed in the first place. Without market incentive, you're only going to proceed in research as fast as centrally-planned authorities dictate you will. Or you're a charity, funded by donations.
None of those things directly deal with device IP, but to be honest cases like this (where someone is being an abject douchebag) are rare, and tend to get discovered, highlighted, and corrected through social pressure. (EMT's have been talking about the cost of EpiPens for years, and there were already initiatives under way to allow EMT's to inject Epi directly: http://thesouthern.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/new-state-law-will-allow-emts-to-inject-epinephrine/article_42dbddd9-a035-509b-b99a-7f720c7411b0.html
If there's a justifiable reason for a price hike, it'll become public as well. Often there is. E.g., a critical component has restricted availability.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
So its illegal to buy it from overseas, but its not illegal to take the profits overseas ????
Uh, no.
Medical treatment in jail is usually once you actually pass out and become unresponsive. Pain and problems before that tend to be ignored. Show up at the ER with no plan to pay, sure, but not jail.
A 1 ml ampule of epinephrine costs about $5. An insulin syringe about 25 cents. That is enough for three normal epi-pen doses - more than enough for any emergency. Sensitive hikers carry this. Folks working around bees and wasps too. If your doctor won't prescribe it, find a doctor who will. Of course you will have to learn to break the top off the ampule and fill the syringe up, getting rid of little bubbles. The rest is the the same. The only reason epi-pens are an issue is because many, perhaps most people are accustomed to Big Pharma and insurance companies leading them to believe that they will take care of them, but only if they stop thinking for themselves.
>"the U.S. "is the only developed nation on Earth which allows pharmaceutical companies to set their own prices."
There is nothing inherently wrong with a free market..... as long as the market really is free and isn't being controlled by unregulated monopolies. That is what we are seeing happen with things like the Epi-Pen. And in cases where patents are creating artificial monopolies, we have to examine if there should be regulation (as we rightfully regulate all other monopolies).
As for the backlog at the FDA for generics- that is just inexcusable.
Oh, and yes, I am one of the people that must have an Epi-Pen or risk losing my life if I accidentally eat a nut (which happened once and nearly did so). So yes, I have a horse in this race...
The cost to the NHS is ~£26 each. You can buy them from registered UK online pharmacies for ~£45 each. Given that the £ has devalued rather more than somewhat against the US $, this may give you some sense of scale as to just much of a ripoff the price of $300 each is. It also makes rather a nonsense of the 8% profit margin mentioned in the article although - to be fair - it isn't made clear as to whether this is the overall margin for the company or the pens.
You'd be surprised what people do to get not only medical treatment but also a roof over their head in cold winters. Also your statement simply isn't true everywhere.
How about taking care of Mylan first instead of letting them off the hook?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Cant let healthy competition happen. Expect high tariffs, or outright ban of import.
The more I learn about America, the more it seems like a 3rd world shithole.
A big splash happened recently when a cancer patient was jailed for being a "deadbeat". He did NOT get his meds while in jail.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
EpiPen has a competitor, another pen injector, that costs 1/3 as much.
Also, if the drug itself costs $2 or so, why don't schools and such buy a bottle of the drug, and some cheap needles like dope addicts use, and just inject the dose that way? I can understand an individual not wanting to fumble with a needle in an emergency, but a lot of the market for this is schools, and they could train some of the staff to do it when a kid has an attack or something.
This article discusses the corruption in congress (!) which reduces competition for pen-type devices. The thing's not even covered by patents!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-27/epipen-scandal-worse-you-think-what-you%E2%80%99re-not-being-told
But I still don't get why people don't take advantage of the competitors that exist. A lot of it is health insurance covering daily needs - when people pay for expensive things they shop, when they don't pay, and can't even find out prices because the providers all hide them under 100 pages of bullshit, then people don't shop.
We need a transparent flat pricing law, for everything. Health care, college, electricity, whatever - any routinely provided product or service (as opposed to idiosyncratic goods like houses or art) that you want to sell, you sell it for the same well known price to everyone, or you don't sell it at all. There's an epidemic of rent seekers in every sector of the economy, using artificial complexity, information asymmetry, and dynamic pricing to screw consumers at every turn. And now retailers are poised to start doing the same thing, using vast computer arrays to beat you in the "negotiation" every time. The economy is becoming entirely zero-sum, and you're getting the zero.
There are other epinephrine auto-injectors on the market in the US, cleared by the FDA. A simple Google search will show Adrenaclick at the top of page 1 (FDA cleared, available, and cheaper than EpiPen). It's not hard to find.
The problem here is that people want an "EpiPen", which is a BRAND, not a drug. These guys do not have a monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors (the thing people need), they have a trademark on "EpiPen" (their product name), which is totally reasonable.
This is not an FDA issue, a generic drug access issue, or an issue with the pharma industry's reduction of effective R&D everywhere but the US. This is about people being susceptible to marketing and branding.
"...the global Human Insulin market accounted for USD 27.0 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach USD 43.6 billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of around 8.3% between 2016 and 2021." from http://www.econotimes.com/Human-Insulin-Market-Poised-to-Surge-from-USD-270-Billion-in-2015-to-USD-436-Billion-Globally-by-2021-%E2%80%93-ZionMarketResearchCom-268160
At the price of $113,562.30/gallon and growing, no one should be surprised by this.
Here is the math on that: Insulin is about $300/10 ml vial and there are 3785.41 ml in a gallon, and so: $300 * 3785.41 / 10 = $113,562.30
Doctor Banting is rolling over in his grave. http://insulinnation.com/treatment/medicine-drugs/selling-lifetime-insulin/
International and older versions of books are useless by design. This is how companies like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Wiley, and others pull off the scam:
Instructors are given "Free" tools for students to use when submitting their homework.
Students purchase new books at full price, and are able to use the code contained within the book.
Students who purchase used books find that the code does not work. They are unable to submit homework and must purchase the new book.
Students who purchase international versions of the book do not have a working code. They must also purchase a new book.
Other books, for subjects such as Calculus, may simply shuffle the questions at the end of the chapter. Students who purchase the previous edition of the book find that they can not submit the homework and must purchase the new book.
Finally, some books have editions specifically for each university. They may have an extra chapter, but they are required by the instructor.
There may be other schemes, but the objective is the same - everybody pays full price.
The difference? After spending less than $50 for an entire semester of used copies of college texts, I found that I had to spend over $200 per book. The used Calculus book was $2.95 and was one edition older than the new $225.00 edition. Side by side, they are identical, minus the shuffled review questions.
"is the only developed nation on Earth which allows pharmaceutical companies to set their own prices."
this statement is simply not true. Even in Australia they set their own prices and drugs not listed as being subsidised by government can truly have insane prices. The only thing we have is the government rejects drugs for the program subsidies if the pharma companies aren't reasonable in price. Being a government subsidised drug is far more beneficial than a limited market at high prices in most circumstances.
It seems Big Pharm companies are taking turns on who is going to be in the spotlight this week for their unregulated ability to gouge the shit out of folks who need the medications just to survive.
What needs to happen is the whole fucking industry needs to be regulated with price caps on everything they sell. If they give any shit about it, simply open up the overseas markets and tell Big Pharm to go screw themselves.
I know someone who was just informed their cancer treatment is going to cost $240,000. This is at least 3x times their yearly salary. Who the f*ck can afford this other than the 1% types ?
I think I would just take death instead. At least my beneficiaries would have a decent nest egg instead of giving it to those who profit by screwing everyone over.
I understand they need to make a profit to remain operational, but the profits they're making is absurd and it comes at quite a cost for everyone else.
Regulate it and stop the monopoly in its tracks. If they can sell the product overseas for a fraction of the cost, then they can do it here as well. If not, they can GTFO.
the right wing in our nation spent billions wining local elections so they could take the state senates and then gerrymandered their way into the national house & senate. Progressives won the popular vote in the last 3 elections but still lost because of this. If nothing else that's why I want Hilary. She's likely to stack the Supreme court with left leaning candidates that'll shut gerrymandering down. Trump/Pence will do the opposite. Imagine a court with 3 Clarence Thomases on it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Before you Bernie Sanders supporters say this is why we need to regulate the drug companies, you should ask why the drug prices are so high. It is because the fda in collusion with the ama and the congress and the bar have created a system where only the few companies are allowed to provide safe legal drugs. And legal drugs kill more people than illegal drugs. Politicians and their cronies profit while the citizens suffer. Neither trump Clinton or Bernie will fix this. Only you can fix this when you say enough is enough
The patents on this expired long ago.
This is the big ugly hand of the regulatory super-state at work. No drugs can be sold in the USA without approval of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and they have a decades-long well-earned reputation for dragging their feet on approving drugs and manufacturers.
Sometimes their caution is GREAT, as when they never approved Thalidomide and American children were spared from severe birth defects that occurred in the US and Europe. They have also spared uncounted numbers of Americans from getting counterfeit drugs and being severely harmed or killed while thinking they are obeying their doctors instructions.
Unfortunately, the flip-side of that caution is that it takes mountains of money and years to get each drug approved at each manufacturer, so it a drug is not going to make enough money to justify those regulatory costs a company is not going to bother. This means there are currently only 3 vendors approved to produce the EpiPen in the US and 2 of them are offline right now (one halted by the FDA). The only company currently producing is doing what monopolies love to do: charging what the market will bear. Their executives convince themselves that it's OK to do it because insurance companies are the ones being bilked. Unfortunately for their PR deprtment, in the real world, and particularly now with Obamacare's high-deductibles, average people are the ones eating the price hike.
The solution: Change the FDA. Make it cheap and fast for a drug manufacturer to get approved to make any drug if they can prove that they are using industry-standard (or better) processes for quality control and if they are producing a chemically-identical product. Once the basic drug is approved, and the patents are expired, no other company should have to prove the efficacy andsafety of the same drug over and over again, they should only have to prove they are making the same drug and making it just as safely. Don't end patents (the stupid and simplistic faux-solution). That would destroy the sources of cash for most drug research by eliminating potential returns from long-shot R&D investments.
The solution isn't ordering stuff from other countries, voting with a wallet or pocketbook. The solution is to vote with your sneakers. When the greedy bastards and slavering morons realize they're the only ones left in Amerika, they'll maybe realize all the smart, useful, resourceful people left, and moved to countries that aren't fucked up like yours.
Once upon a time, most countries were fucked up, and so people left them and went to Amerika. Over time, this made Amerika rich and powerful; other countries realized they were fucked up and fixed their shit. Well, some did, anyway. Over time, a role-reversal took place, and now Amerikans think their country is the best, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Time to bail out if you can. The neighborhood has really gone straight to shit.
What is not fine is to give a very long monopoly to only one company to make them... without competition the price will not naturally fall.
You have to allow some time let companies have some profits on research, but how long has the Epi-Pen been around? Long enough there should be more than one company making hem now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Find the CEO digs and burn it to the ground!
As the medical monopoly prices itself out of the market, capitalism busts through with the same irresistible force it does whenever this happens.
They call it the black market, and we call it the real market.
If daughter is CEO of Mylan, the senator is in clear conflict of interest by voting on or discussing the issue.
Or does ethics matter at all?
Same thing applies to NHTSA. If I want to drive a car built to EU standards, I should be able to ship one over*. And the crappy US manufacturing and dealership mafia can go straight to hell with their regulatory buddies who try to tell me who I should be doing business with. It's no different than what the mob used to do in NYC with garbage collection. Those responsible at the regulatory agencies need to be shuttled off to John Gotti's old cell ASAP.
*But muh safety! I can legally import USED European vehicles into this country. And non-EPA compliant as well, so long as they are old enough. So evidently, bringing in a smoke-belching death trap isn't the issue. It's me having money for a new vehicle but not spending it at the local dealership.
</rant>
Have gnu, will travel.
This CEO lady is going to be the proverbial straw... "Daddy, 'pass a law against those evil Canadian pharmacies!"
And judging by what's happened with Hillary, he will, and not a damn thing will be done about it on our behalf.
I had a sucky sig.
I said how I'd do it: Tell the FDA to stop requiring the same drug to be re-approved by each vendor in a very expensive and years-long process and instead switch to the presumption that THE DRUG ITSELF is approved after the original patented version has been approved and in-use for so long its patents have expired. By the time it goes generic, any other company should only have to prove they are making the same formulation and doing so with proper quality controls.
The reason the GOP fought "government negotiation" was simple: It was a further government encroachment and step to even further government meddling that keeps making things worse, and would only exacerbate the core problem created by our "friends" in places like the UK and Canada who do it. Those foreign governments doing it for their socialist medical services are what forced the American consume to bear all the R&D costs and drove-up OUR drug prices; they threatened to break the patents and let the American companies get ripped-off if the American companies did not sell at prices too low to cover all the costs. The result was that the companies lowered the prices over there to a level that allowed a profit on the manufacturing costs but no margin to cover the R&D costs which went entirely onto the US customers and their insurance companies. The US govt cannot make that play, because there is no other body of consumers onto which the R&D costs can be shifted.
As for the usual "crocodile tears" of government that it cannot be competent because there's not enough money: BULL. The FDA is one of those agencies that has been plagued for many years with the disease of giving out millions of dollars in annual bonuses to executives. Google it. If some FDA exec is denying a trip for an inspector becase an AMTRAK ticket cannot be afforded, FIRE the exec and buy some tickets with the savings. Obama and the Democrats have been running the FDA for over 7 years. Priorities????
No! Free trade means you have no choice but to take America's subsidized food, but still aren't allowed to sell your cheaper medicine. books, electronics, etc etc into America.
Parent has no idea what they are talking about. The drug has long since left patent and costs pennies to make.
During this incredibly contentious Presidential elections with accusations of rampant corruption and accusations of immoral actions in return for money, it is appropriate to point out that this company is run by a Democrat, who is the daughter of a Democrat Senator, and that the company gave money to Hillary's "Foundation". The very same Hillary who climbed on her high horse about the cost increase but has now fallen silent, even though the cost increase is still $300 from $100.
So the lesson we learn here is that Democrats are against high Drug Prices...unless they are profiting.
is it more dangerous than not having an epipen?
Harry Lime: Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.
Martins: You used to believe in God.
Harry Lime: Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.
Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.
Just carry the small injection package, small tin box with a needle, syringe, bottle of Eppie and it's just a couple bucks. The epipen is a CONVENIENCE item. I don't know why everyone is making this out like it's a frigging big deal! It's a CONVENINCE ITEM. No one is pricing this medicine OUT of your price range. It's a CONVENIENCE item. Just use the regular stuff for a couple bucks. If most people did that, they would either drop the price, or go out of business.
of the party affiliation.....
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Provocative line: “The US is the only developed nation on Earth which allows pharmaceutical companies to set their own prices.” Of those 18 provocative words, the most egregious is “allows.” http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... That presumes government owns all property, real and intellectual, in which it magnanimously “allows” us a share, but only as it, government, please. That further presumes that government itself is not the cause of the problem in the first place. Both of those presumptions are wrong, to our great harm. To make this simple, I lay the matter out in clear terms below. That way we can begin discussions wherever it is that you first disagree. Free markets work best to allocate scarce resources. For free markets to work, certain premises are required: many small, independent agents; free flow of information; no distortions such as tariffs, barriers, monopolies The proper role of government is to ensure those premises. Instead, government chooses to meddle directly, and inevitably makes things worse. This is known as iatrogenic disease. In particular, private monopolies are not an issue today. All private monopolies fail: someone always cheats, or defects; substitutes arise; technology advances; fashions change. And if a monopoly should arise, we have a vast apparatus in the US, between the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. (Not that those folks have a good track record, viz. AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon Indeed when he was six, my son asked a challenging question, “how can it be a monopoly if it’s something you don’t need?” I wonder.) Today, private monopolies cannot arise. With modern technology, international trade and global markets, they are simply infeasible. No, the only durable monopolies are those imposed by government, because government first holds the monopoly on violence. Now some government monopolies are good, and temporary. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are in the US Constitution. Others, not so much. That latter includes all the frauds amongst cronies and politicos. That category is the worst violation of free market premises ever, and the one most perpetrated. Cronyism has done orders of magnitude more damage to the US economy than any other violation, including insider trading. As to patents, a primer on the economics. Invention, like any other good or service, must be rewarded in order for it to be produced. Unlike goods and services, intellectual property is peculiarly subject to theft. So government gives inventors standing (term limited) to protect their property with civil remedies. That patent is like a lottery ticket. The inventor tried 10 things. Lost his investment of time, effort, and cash in nine of them. The tenth thing seems to work. Now he must make enough on that tenth thing not only to reward that effort, but to recompense him for the other nine as well. Say the 10 ventures cost $100,000 each. That means the tenth winner must return AT LEAST $1 million. Quite a bit more, in fact, because government comes around to seize its taxes first, and after that, the inventor must do more than break even. That’s the social contract. Before the fact, the politico promises the productive person if he takes risk and makes something that works, he can cash in that lottery ticket.” But after the fact, the politico hypocritically turns all populist and say “I don’t feel that $1,000,000 is merited. I feel $500,000 is more than enough” Who the (trigger warning) is that politico to decide market value? How dare that politico feel it’s up to him to “allow” one price rather than another? Is the patent valid? Then do not violate the terms of the deal. Is there no other competition? Then tell the (trigger warning) FDA to do its job. Is the IP such that people really do need it, as my son asked?
Ok. Here's the deal. There are many individuals --very very greedy-- just like Martin Shkreli. They see something that is life-and-death for people, and they want to profit handsomely for it. You are desperate, its worth your life, so it should be worth your life savings. And they are there to cash in. And they don't care if you live or die. Short of kidnapping them followed by a slow painful dissection, the only sane way to curb their greed is to start a national drug manufacturing company, that has backing of the government, and might (with approval from the government) just ignore onerous patents, and then sell the drug to patients at cost + 10%. Now Republicans in the US would decry this as communist and a shocking intervention in the free market. Meanwhile, every business owner in the history of the world has tried to manipulate the free market (and given their druthers would manipulate the market in a heartbeat). The thing is: there are millions of Martin Shkrelis out there. Greedy bastards who don't give the slightest shit about people and their ability to pay. They let the insurance companies pay, or the radio marathon pay, or are cheerful to watch people sell their houses pay: whatever. The drugs in an epi-pen cost about $2 to make. The pen is mostly plastic and has a needle in the end. The dispenser costs about $1 to make in lots of 1000. The CXO of the company that makes epi-pens says the patent expired a long time ago, its a free market, the FDA refused to endorse anyone else, and they don't mind pocketing 22 million in remuneration per year for doing very very little. They even mentioned that the research was done in 1908 and has long been in the public domain.
Because this is exactly how you get socliazed single payer medical care.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
of the party affiliation.....
Don't be a Republican memeist. Every article I have read so far says specifically that she is the daughter of the Democrat Senator from West Virginia.
Tell me is that supposed to mean that she is a Democrat? And everyone from West Virgian is a Democrat, And BENGHAZI! And just to burst another bubble, I'll be that he is a big fan of Coal mining.
Aww hell, I might as well expose that you are lying From the link to the article:
One Democratic senator whose daughter has allergies has called for action and another Democratic senator's daughter is CEO of the company responsible for the price hike.
O hell, lookie here Right here in River city from the Slashdot summary!
One Democratic senator whose daughter has allergies has called for action and another Democratic senator's daughter is CEO of the company responsible for the price hike. And just to make certain you see it - I know some of you folks need a lot of repetition for the hard stuff to sink in.....One Democratic senator whose daughter has allergies has called for action and another Democratic senator's daughter is CEO of the company responsible for the price hike.
Any questions?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's also possible that part of the reason our drug prices are so out of whack is because everyone else is regulating prices, causing the industry to seek higher profits in the US. Kind of a douchebag maneuver, but is it something that can be fixed without backfiring? It seems like everything we've tried for a century has only made the cost issue worse.
The question that has to be addressed is what created the monopoly that fosters the "price gouging" (no such thing by the way)?
Always, always, always there is government involvement that creates the situation where consumers have no choice. Corporations can't really be held to blame, they are simply scorpions doing what scorpions are going to do (q.v. parable about scorpion and frog). If the government said that ACA plans must cover a monthly pint of Ben & Jerry's, I have zero doubt that the cost of a pint of Ben&Jerry's would rise significantly no matter how crunchy the CEO might be.
Situation is even worse when government creates a monopoly. Why is there no generic form of EpiPen costing $25 per? I had my first epi-pen 30 years ago. Surely their patents have expired? Search and you will certainly find some government regulations propping up the monopoly. See https://mises.org/blog/lack-ep...
(from the Mises link above)
"As it turns out, Mylan has a great friend who keeps would-be competitors out of the market...That friend is the FDA.
"Just this year, Teva Pharmaceutical’s attempt at bringing a generic epinephrine injector to market in the US was blocked by the FDA. Adrenaclick and Twinject were unable to get insurance companies on board and so discontinued their injectors in 2012.
"Adrenaclick has since come back...and the FDA has made it illegal for pharmacies to substitute Adrenaclick as a generic alternative to EpiPen. Another company tried to sidestep the whole auto-injector patent barrier by offering prefilled syringes, but the FDA has stalled them, too.
"Mylan has been repeatedly protected from competition, and it has repeatedly (and predictably) increased the price of EpiPens in response.
"One thing is for sure: capitalism is not to blame. Government regulations have choked this market and many others. What we need is a big dose of freedom.
It has been pointed out that the CEO is a Democrat, the daughter of a Democrat Senator from WV so all of Hillary's bluster on the issue rings hollow.
The solution is not *more* government, as it was more government that caused the problem in the first place.
If they dismantled the FDA the government couldn't stop more affordable options from popping up -which is what happened with the epipen situation.
... except they wouldn't be funded out of your back pocket on April 15th like right now.
Private F&D monitoring and rating agencies would pop up like expedian and the other private credit reporting agencies
Also if you were dying and needed an experimental drug you could just enlist yourself in a trial.
They could have changed this. Instead we got the ACA, which pretty much doubled down on the whole deal.