Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm now clinical cardiac pharmacist, but I still follow the industry news.
This is a generic for the Adrenaclick, not the Epi-pen. It's the same drug but it not AB rated. It's easily fixable by a call from the filling pharmacist to the prescriber of they write for Epi-pen. We do it all the time.
The issue there is that capitalism wasn't in play.
Due to the barrier to entry posed by drug regulation it cost too much for competitors to enter the same market, and would have remained that way if those assholes had not gone full retard.
Iff the practical economic ability to compete exists, safety regulations are enforced, collusion is prevented, consumers are educated well about their purchase decisions, etc.-- then capitalism works pretty darn great.
You see, a "free market" is actually free, not controlled by government-run bureaucracies that make it very difficult for medical device manufacturers to produce something that ISN'T covered by patents any more.
You know, like epinephrine injectors.
Just because this is the only system you know, don't assume it's the only system that works. Before the 80's when boomers became determined to bleed every possible drop of profit out of the economy, hospitals were run by charities and the worlds most famous doctors worked at university teaching hospitals. Even today the majority of medical breakthroughs happen in universities with government grant money, not pharmaceutical giants.
There is credible evidence that in the unregulated free market once a company achieves market dominance all innovation becomes simple incremental upgrades as research money is transferred to investors. Just look at Apple for a perfect example.
For the people who keep saying regulations keep competition low... yeah, most people are perfectly happy with regulations that require companies to actually prove their devices work, they're well funded and their investors aren't gangsters.. so horrible that the people who invented Shake Weights might not be able to bring us their amazing magnet powered pacemakers I'm sure they were working on.
Good luck trying to properly give yourself that injection while suffering from anaphylactic shock, can't breathe, and are about to pass out. If you think it is so easy then would you care to prove it by giving yourself a proper IM injection of saline while being waterboarded?
the patent lasts like 5 or 10 or 20 years (I don't know)
Uh, it's 20 years, sometimes including an additional exclusivity period of up to 5 years (or apparently up to 10 years for certain antibiotics) offered by the FDA in some situations such that competitors' products will not be approved during that time. The exclusivity period isn't guaranteed to run consecutive to the patent period, although the drug companies obviously attempt to engineer it that way if possible.
I just thought that was worth clarifying. Like, "I'm don't recall if Joe was two or four or eight feet tall [and it turns out he might've been as much as twelve feet tall]"... that's not something you should hand-wave away. Yes, it's a complicated situation, but the government-created barriers to entry here (of which drug patents are just a tiny piece) are significant. We do need some barriers, obviously, along with some method of incentivization, but given the high or wildly fluctuating prices of some generics when there doesn't appear to be much of a marginal cost involved (I'm not necessarily saying that's the case with the epi-pens), the system as a whole does not appear to be functioning terribly well.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *