CVS Announces Super Cheap Generic Alternative To EpiPen (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pharmaceutical giant CVS announced Thursday that it has partnered with Impax Laboratories to sell a generic epinephrine auto-injector for $109.99 for a two-pack -- a dramatic cut from Mylan's Epipen two-pack prices, which list for more than $600 as a brand name and $300 as a generic. The lower-cost auto-injector, a generic form of Adrenaclick, is available starting today nationwide in the company's more than 9,600 pharmacies. Its price resembles that of EpiPen's before Mylan bought the rights to the life-saving devices back in 2007 and raised the price repeatedly, sparking outcry. Helena Foulkes, president of CVS Pharmacy, said the company felt compelled to respond to the urgent need for a more affordable alternative. "Over the past year, nearly 150,000 people signed on to a petition asking for a lower-cost epinephrine auto-injector option and millions more were active in social media searching for a solution," she said in a statement. The price of $109.99 for the alternative applies to those with and without insurance, CVS noted. And Impax is also offering a coupon to reduce the cost to just $9.99 for qualifying patients. Also in the press statement, Dr. Todd Listwa of Novant Health, a network of healthcare providers, noted the importance of access to epinephrine auto-injectors, which swiftly reverse rapid-onset, deadly allergic reactions in some. "For these patients, having access to emergency epinephrine is a necessity. Making an affordable epinephrine auto-injector device accessible to patients will ensure patients have the medicine they need, when they need it."

Comments

Ready...

[guygo]

I see Mylan's PR people have their "I find the Adrenaclick impossible to use" shills ready to go. We can expect them to spend millions on trying to discredit the competitor's much cheaper alternative. Heaven forfend they spend any of that money reducing the price of their own product.

Re:you mean capitalism works?

[Anonymous Coward]

The free market enabled it, and broken government regulations allowed it to last so long while CVS made it to market.

Things like the ACA have added miles of red tape into the mix, which is also enabling insurance companies to do exactly what Mylan has done.

Pharmaceutical companies can set whatever price they want, there's no regulations against it, especially during their 5 year patent period.

Quite obviously they can set whatever price they want, period. Mylan has owned the rights to EpiPen since 2007, which was now 10 years ago. EpiPen existed before then, so until someone was able to make it through the red tape with an alternative, they have raked in billions.

What's most amazing is that law makers, on both sides of the aisle, have postured and pretended to care. Yet nothing has been done.

I desperately hope that the Congressional term limit amendment passes. These human piles of garbage need to be sent packing before they get tied up in the powermill.

Re: Good for CVS

[Anonymous Coward]

I convinced my wife to stop buying name brands after showing her they are mostly made in Bangladesh and other third world countries with poor product safety records, while most store brands are made right in our own city (Montreal, Canada)

Re:you mean capitalism works?

[Anonymous Coward]

If capitalism worked, two injectors for $110 wouldn't be our best option. Yeah, it's well below what Mylan charges; it's also still too expensive by at least a factor of four or five, and it's a back-breaking cost for the poor.

(Yes yes, I know, if they want to be alive they shouldn't be poor. How dare they.)

Re:You don't know what a free market is, do you?

[Required Snark]

You are too young to for this to be part of your personal experience, but there once was a drug called Thalidomide. It was sold for morning sickness and caused severe birth defects. Thousands of infants died and tens of thousands were born with deformed limbs. This was in the mid 1950's and caused a massive change in how drugs were tested. Thalidomide is still used, but not by pregnant women.

More recently there are significant problems with metal on metal joint replacements. For some designs the failure rate is 75% to 100%. And this was after FDA approval was granted.

So is the requirement for government approval the "bureaucracy" you are talking about? If so, I'm sure you can find somewhere in the world where you can get a completely unregulated major medical procedure, say involving surgery. Before you go, just leave a contact address so we know where to send the condolences for your funeral. I, at least, would consider your demise to be suicide.

Re:you mean capitalism works?

[Orgasmatron]

Here's the thing though... the poor don't pay $55 for these things. They also didn't pay $1000, or whatever.

The only people who ever paid $1000 or even $55 were middle class guys with Health Savings Accounts that hadn't yet reached their deductible for the year and rich guys stocking the first aid kits on their yachts.

Everyone else either has some sort of medical coverage (what we laughably call "insurance"), or if they are poor and somehow without a medical plan (medicaid is happy to pay for epi pens) the manufacturer would provide a coupon to get it for free or at some nominal cost.

Also, the people making their own are usually spending less than $20 each, which sets the rough ceiling for the free market cost. Mass production can probably bring that cost down to $5 or $10 each. But the free market isn't in charge here. You can't just design, build and sell these things. You need to beg for government approval.

Re:you mean capitalism works?

[silentcoder]

It's worth noting that, prior to the FDA's establishment, more than 80% of all "medicine" sold in the US were so-called "patent medicine". These drugs, contrary to popular myth, didn't all do nothing - most of them were filled with deadly and addictive substances (usually opium) which the buyers had no idea they were buying. They were marketed for things so completely unrelated that it's physically impossible one drug could treat them all - but they sure made you high.

In short - it was a disaster that killed far more people than it ever cured. In the post-FDA world, this problem has shifted exclusively to those things which the FDA cannot regulate due to congressionmen selling out suplements and homeopathy. A recent study found that 1 in 3 supplements contained no shred whatsoever of the plant they are supposed to have been derived from. Suplements kill people on a daily basis due to dangerous ingredients and a lack of proper warnings about correct usage - seeing as they aren't regulated and nobody is making sure they know what correct usage actually means.

Where regulation does not exist, neither does medicine.

Re:You don't know what a free market is, do you?

[meerling]

Among other conditions. A free market is essentially a utopian theory for economics, totally unrealistic despite it being desirable.
It also assumes there are no real barriers to market entry so anyone can decide to market something if they think they can do it better.
That is so far from reality, it's virtually insane.
Anyway, it's a neat idea, but it's not a viable one.

Re:you mean capitalism works?

[mjwx]

I completely understand the struggles people who are impacted by a disease and there's a cure out of there, but just costs so much.

At the same time, for all it's flaws in the patent system, in the grand scheme of things... the patent lasts like 5 or 10 or 20 years (I don't know). My point is it's not that long.

Let's remember that the drug wasn't there before. That's the price the society pays for a dynamic drug market.

You invent something; it's prohibitively expensive for a bit, then the price drops.

The alternative is... maybe it's not invented.

The former sadly is easy to rail against. The later is a bit more complex.

You do know that most drugs are actually developed with public money. Universities and government funded research labs. That means we already pay the cost of development, testing, so on and so forth. If it were left up to what was profitable, we'd have almost nothing cured at all.

Also cures and treatments aren't particularly profitable. Big Pharma spends a lot of its research and marketing budget on "lifestyle" drugs which are mostly two things,

1. Hardness pills. Because people with waning libido's will pay anything.
2. Vitamin supplements. Not that these are expensive, but they're so cheap to make because they don't have to pass FDA or equivalent testing. That means they don't have to work, in fact it's better if they dont work because then they cant be accidentally scheduled. They make placebo's a dozen for the penny and sell them a pound for 12 to hipsters and middle aged mothers who think multi-vitamins make them healthy. Their main cost here is advertising, convincing the middle aged mothers that popping a pill each morning compensates for their bad lifestyle choices.

When it comes for a cure for an illness, Big Pharma contributes very little in its development, they just buy up the rights for cheap, manufacture it cheaply and charge a fortune for it. This is why many governments forcibly license patents for local companies to make the drugs.