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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!
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.
This is not a free market. In a free market you'd be free to buy from overseas companies.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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!
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!”
Yeah, the Obama FDA, that hotbed of conservative activism!
Also, since when was price fixing by governments a "free market" solution?
You make it sounds like the Democrats are in favor of free trade from online pharmacies, when a quick Google search and clicking on the first link is enough to dispel that.
I'm not saying there aren't government-lovers on both sides in this area, but to cast it as 'the "conservatives" are against a free market, and the "liberals" are for the free market.' when it's more the opposite is quite a stretch there...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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?
I left the US right about when they were starting to be allowed. Now when I go back it's pretty disconcerting, bordering on revolting, to see how much tv space is taken up with drug ads.
There is no reason for drug ads. Period. Drugs should be allowed by efficacy and safety, priced honsetly and prescribed by qualified unbiased doctors for the conditions they treat best. None of that is true in the modern US of A
Well, it's the very fact that the alternative is, possibly, death that makes it possible for a company to do this. This thing occupies a peculiar corner case where the demand is modest, but inelastic.
This means a monopolist can milk the market by raising the price to insane levels, but because the market is small no competitor wants to enter it. Were the market to become competitive it is so small that the newly entered competitors wouldn't make much off their efforts. This is contrasted with statins, which are blockbuster drugs. You don't need a very large slice of that pie for the slice to be very large indeed.
The same thing happened last year with Duraprim. If you have toxoplasmosis, you absolutely have to have it. But how many people get toxoplasmosis?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Primatene Mist was banned by the FDA in 2011 because it contained CFCs.
http://hubpages.com/health/Wha...
Do you have evidence that Primatene wanted the FDA to pull their product off the market?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
No one said the company isn't allowed to turn a profit - but as a patient, do you want the sole supplier of medication that keeps you alive to suddenly realize they are the ONLY REASON YOU ARE ALIVE and bumping your daily expense up to a million dollars?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Um. Dude. You might want to look around, this site is largely due to the existence of free software. FREE. People do it and give it away for FREE.
You just can't fathom value being non-monetary which makes your economic-fu weak. Homo econicus ain't no fool, Homo Economicus has gradients of preferences, in relation to and driven by a variety externalities, which regardless of your mental capacity to comprehend them exist. Right now. In you, your inner homo economicus, is erupting with complex value calculations that you are probably to ignorant to clearly understand.
You should stop being so hung up on money, and let your inner homo economicus run free. Enjoy all your preferences, not just the ones society shows you will satisfy you.
A big secret I learned a long time ago, that sort of makes this all work, is that by helping each other (think free shit) we get along better in the universe. It actually makes us happy and fulfilled. What?! That is our most selfish center is, is best satisfied by caring about helping other humans?
That sounds fucked up. Real fucked up... But shit that does make some fucking sense. It's probably our evolutionary edge, because there ain't no fuckin way we out predator'd everything else on this planet lone wolfing it for a few million years... That and thumbs.
Thumbs are no fucking joke.
Without personal gain, shit just doesn't get done.
People managed to make money (even obscene amounts) before patents and copyrights existed. They will be able to make money (even obscene amounts) after patents and copyright are given the boot.
Or put another way, if nobody is making something, someone will come along and make it. If there are too many people making copies of something, then some of those people will go out of business. The idea that without patent and copyright protection, nobody will build anything, is without merit and stands in contrast to 10,000 years of commerce.
Last note: copyrights and patents are artificial *monopolies*. They exist in direct contradiction to the concept of a free market. One cannot be in favor of unregulated free markets and be in favor of copyrights and patents: They stand at odds to one another. If you believe they can co-exist then you either do not understand what patents and copyrights are, or you do not understand what free markets are...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Without personal gain, shit just doesn't get done. You don't work for free. Why do you expect anyone else to.
As a real patient, I would rather the entire the entire industry not be destroyed either by crass idiots or morons with "good intentions".
The issue isn't that simple and there's a lot at stake that you're blissfully unaware of.
Sheesh! The Epi-pens cost less than $50 in materials to make and yet the maker wants to charge over $300 apiece for them. The only way they can get away with it is by having an exclusive license to sell them in the USA. The only reason they can get away with it is they have no competition.
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.
And exactly how do you propose to change that? Do you want FDA employees to work longer hours? Or do you want them to work twice as fast in the same hours? Can you speed them up like a tape recorder?
Actually, the FDA does a pretty good job right now. They approve drugs faster than European regulators. They had a backup several years ago when Congress (actually, Republicans) thought it would be a great idea to cut taxes and cut the budgets of government agencies.
I remember the CEO of a biotechnology company (I think Centicor) complaining that the FDA inspector couldn't come to his plant because they didn't have the budget for the train fare on Amtrack.
FDA regulation has little to do with why drugs cost so much money. More important is the Republicans refusing to let the government negotiate prices with the drug makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the UK, they have an agency, NICE, which decides how much the drugs are worth, which is often half or a third as much as the US price.
As an example, my wife's kidney dialysis sessions are billed out at $3,925 each, for a total of about $600,000 per year. The insurance company's "real price" is $290 per session.
Well, the original intention of Congress was to have free market competition in kidney dialysis, to bring the price down, but that didn't work. There were a lot of small providers but a couple of big companies took over the industry and turned it into a monopoly. You can't negotiate prices with a monopoly.
It seems that in the modern economy, the free market doesn't last long as many industries turn into monopolies. Amazon is a book-selling monopoly. Google is an internet advertising monopoly.
If we must have a monopoly, we might as well have the government running it.
>And exactly how do you propose to change that? Do you want FDA employees to work longer hours? Or do you want them to work twice as fast in the same hours? Can you speed them up like a tape recorder?
The first half of his post is classic repulican/libertarian "the state is too big and it's all government's fault" - so I conclude his plan is to do it by cutting the FDA's budget by 60% and firing 80% of their employees. You know because any time any aspect of government is in any way imperfect it's because it's too big and 'starve the beast' will somehow magically make it work better (as opposed to what actually happens which is that ordinary people who rely on public services get viciously fucked over... again).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Erm... based on your username, I'm going to assume you were completely high when you wrote that piece of utterly ahistorical crap.
Sorry the shutdown was the republican's fault and their demands had NOTHING to do with the Obama-care website, they were demanding the defunding of the entire Obamacare law (effectively repealing it without a repeal).
No president would ever agree to terms that means shutting down his signature legislation because congress is trying to blackmail him - Obama called their bluff believing they were not actually *insane* enough to go ahead with the crazy shutdown plan.
What he didn't plan on was that, at this time, the so-called "freedom caucus" (teaparty anti-government nutjobs who somehow got into government as opposed to the backwoods dumptruck graveyards they belong in - these guys made Ron Paul look like a fan of big-government) had enough power over the rest of the republicans to force them into it. Those nutjobs genuinely believe the very existence of the federal government to be an unholy satanic crime against god (no, I'm not exagerating) so they were quite happy to see it all shut down since that was literally the purpose for which they ran: they ran in ORDER to be able to shut down the government. Their only regret about the shutdown is that it ended, they wanted that to be permanent and saw the budget fight as an opportunity to show that it can be done and thought everything would work so much better with it down that voters would demand it become permanent... their experiment failed, it was an unmitigated disaster for the country and the republican party rightfully got blamed.
What really makes this stand out is that the entire freedom caucus at the time was only 44 members - that's about 10% of congress who somehow managed to get all the rest of the republicans so scared that they went ahead with the shutdown despite being relatively sane humans who knew it was a crazy idea. A bit like Paul Ryan "supporting" Trump now.
Sorry pal, you can't just rewrite history to make everything Obama's fault. I know republicans blame him for everything bad that ever happened up to and including 9/11, Hitler and original sin but it just doesn't make sense to blame a president for things that happened before he was elected or against his wishes. You want to be mad at Obama - blame him for the actual bad stuff that DID happen on his watch. Blame him for the extralegal and unconsttutional fuckup known as the drone war, blame him for the expansion of NSA spying on his watch - blame him for having a penis so much bigger than Trumps that he never once felt insecure enough to make it a subject of political debate... but don't make shit up.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *