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Feds Go After Mylan For Scamming Medicaid Out of Millions On EpiPen Pricing (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the nine or so years that Mylan, Inc. has been selling -- and hiking the price -- of EpiPens, the drug company has been misclassifying the life-saving device and stiffing Medicaid out of full rebate payments, federal regulators told Ars. Under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, drug manufacturers, such as Mylan, can get their products covered by Medicaid if they agree to offer rebates to the government to offset costs. With a brand-name drug such as the EpiPen, which currently has no generic versions and has patent protection, Mylan was supposed to classify the drug as a "single source," or brand name drug. That would mean Mylan is required to offer Medicaid a rebate of 23.1 percent of the costs, plus an "inflation rebate" any time Mylan raises the price of the brand-name drug at a rate higher than inflation. Mylan has opted for such price increases -- a lot. Since Mylan bought the rights to EpiPen in 2007, it has raised the price on 15 separate occasions, bringing the current list price to $608 for a two-pack up from about $50 a pen in 2007. That's an increase of more than 500 percent, which easily beats inflation. But instead of classifying EpiPen as a "single source" drug, Mylan told regulators that it's a "non-innovator multiple source," or generic drug. Under that classification, Mylan is only required to offer a rebate of 13 percent and no inflation rebates. It's unclear how much money Mylan has skipped out on paying in total to state and federal governments. But according to the state health department of Minnesota, as reported by CNBC, the misclassification cost that state $4.3 million this year alone.
Peasant, don't you realize that Mylan is run by a Democratic Senator's daughter? Your lowly kind is not allowed to criticize the royalty of the exulted overclass! Grandees like Manchins or Clintons are not subject to your grubby "laws," nor are their gets.
Know your place!
these clowns should get crucified for basically holding the public hostage
1 RICO charges should be filed against the company and the execs (i think its called separately and corporately liable??)
2 the IRS should do a full bore forensic audit on the paperwork for the last 7 years
3 the company should be required to pay back every penny plus 25% of the increase
4 their entire patent portfolio should be wiped and they should be required to assist any company currently in the same or semi related market on building a duplicate (in fact those patents should become PD)
if this does cause the company to become bankrupt then the Execs should be bared from any medical business for the next 15 years (or just give them all a nice 10-20 in a not actually nice prison)
next up for the Full Roman Treatment the guys that make Naloxone/Narcan
Because Adreanaclick's product is not recognized as a AB rated generic, meaning that it can't be directly substituted by the pharmacist. The physician can WRITE for the particular product, but they have to actually do that.
For all of the Sturm Und Drang, I don't understand why the manufacturers of the other injectors and the mail order pharmacies don't run an advertising campaign to 'ask your doctor' to prescribe the specific product rather than 'Epi-Pen'.
Yes, Mylan is a slime ball company but there are ways around this.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's true. But, -according to the doctors I talk to- in most situations (unlike how it works with pretty much any other drug) a pharmacist may not substitute an Adrenaclick when presented with a prescription for an EpiPen. In order to be able to sell an Adrenaclick-brand autoinjector, the prescription needs to be written for either an "adrenaline auto-injector" or for an Adrenaclick.
Rule-makers' stated reasoning is something along the lines of "We don't want people who've trained on one auto-injector to get confused if they're presented with another!". But from what I hear, the two are functionally identical.