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Mylan's Epic EpiPen Price Hike Wasn't About Greed -- It's Worse, Lawsuit Claims (arstechnica.com)
Mylan engaged in a campaign to squash a rival to its EpiPen allergy treatment and artificially inflate the price of the drug to maintain a market monopoly, French drugmaker Sanofi said in a lawsuit. From a report: With the lofty prices and near-monopoly over the market, Mylan could dangle deep discounts to drug suppliers -- with the condition that they turn their backs on Sanofi's Auvi-Q -- the lawsuit alleges. Suppliers wouldn't dare ditch EpiPens, the most popular auto-injector. And with the high prices, the rebates wouldn't put a dent in Mylan's hefty profits, Sanofi speculates. Coupled with a smear campaign and other underhanded practices, Mylan effectively pushed Sanofi out of the US epinephrine auto-injector market, Sanofi alleges. The lawsuit, filed Monday in a federal court in New Jersey, seeks damages under US Antitrust laws.
>> Mylan's Epic EpiPen Price Hike Wasn't About Greed -- It's Worse
>> Mylan effectively pushed Sanofi out of the US epinephrine auto-injector market
Competitor A pushes competitor B out of the market to corner the market and drive up profits, right? In other words, it's about greed, right?
Bank fiasco 2008 nobody sent to jail Drug companies and medical companies numerous antitrust and illegal anti consumer practices, nobody in jail Banks knowingly laundering drug money nobody in jail
love is just extroverted narcissism
If Sanofi proves its case, the judge should permanently revoke all patents in and related to EpiPen.
Let's see which drug manufacturer wants to be the next one to kill the golden goose after that ruling.
To get some sanity in the drug marketplace there needs to be just a single price that the drug manufacturers charge. None of these crazy pricing schemes that really screw the uninsured or the underinsured that have to pay the top price.
It's not just drugs, the entire medical industry has these crazy deals where the little guy who is the least able to pay ends up paying the most.
FWIW, and I speak as a Democrat here, Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, Democratic Senator from West Virginia.
the thing that bothers me with this story is that you have a disconnect between government funded healthcare, and profit seeking private corporations.
if you have a government entity such as medicare (or really any socialized institution), that essentially guarantees payment to a drug company for a treatment; coupled with a corporation which has a responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit.. The situation that arises absolutely incentivizes the company to charge as much as they can get away with, since after all the US gov't has essentially infinitely deep pockets. And a very similar situation arises with the military and higher education.
And the shitty thing is, any attempt by the government to reign in profit margins and/or maximum price on a drug company would be met with the usual right winger response of "less regulation, free market!" (And this is coming from a republican.. I just don't get mental gymnastics on this level.)
I had actually just finished reading this on Ars before coming here to see it at the top of the page. The summary leaves out a very important detail.
Sanofi is suing Mylan claiming that their underhanded attempts cost them business. While that may be true, I think that this may have a more severe impact on their sales:
"In 2015, Sanofi pulled Auvi-Q following quality control issues. The device has since been put back on the market by another pharmaceutical company, Kaléo. The list price of the newly released Auvi-Q is set at $4,500."
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Well, I suppose that saves Mylan on bribes to get that precious, precious regulatory capture that they've also been using to block competing tech from the US market.
Natural selection will sort this out eventually.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Their behavior deserves it. Their corporation is dissolved, all their executives (including Mizz Bresch) are banned from working in similar positions for life, and all their intellectual property is public domain.
Corporatism != Free Market
is $14.00 for two.
Just FYI.
it shows the difference between The Little Guy and the 0.0001% when a guy can get charged for standing next to an open beer bottle left on the street and a BEERCORP can have a cargo ship of beer smash open on a dock and no charges would be filed.
personally i think that the execs involved should go down for a couple hundred homicide charges (since i would bet that a buncha kids died as a result of this bovine manure)
We were able to get some Adrenaclick brand injectors at CVS recently for $10. I think it is $109 without coupon, still cheaper than Epipen. I had wondered about the coupons and discounts that the drug companies had, now it makes sense... they probably even write off the discounts on their taxes.
If memory serves me correctly, Intel / Microsoft were hit and lost lawsuits for this exact behavior.
Not to mention the assist from Obama that requires all public schools to stock epi-pens.
What free market?
Don't worry, the market will take care of it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
vs Justice Dems. We're trying to reign them in in the wake of Hilary's loss. But there's a lot of money out there.
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it's that quality control issues have negligible impact on sales unless there's a 100% death rate. Not among the drug's users, but among patients in general.
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Which wouldn't be quite a problem if a generic was out, or expected out anytime soon--have you seen some of what the FDA insists of generics? It's got to be 'exact same,' which has actually caused designs that are improvements to get bounced.
It doesn't help that while yes, they did certainly cut down on that infamous paperwork backlog, they did a lot of it by rejecting as improperly-filled-out forms that, at the time they'd been filed, had been--and filing again with whatever the current version of the form is will just get you at the end of the queue, with no certainty that they won't change the rules between now and when they finally get around to actually processing it. Would it be too much to require that the paperwork be processed according to the rules at the time the paperwork was filed, at least if it's been allowed to sit around for a certain length of time beforehand? (If this seems dangerous: Combine it with soft transitions and penalties for the bureaucracy having too great a backlog, set up so that if that rule has to be applied to paperwork being processed now, the penalties for the backlog are also hitting.)
Republicans should distance themselves from Joe Manchin, rather than try & co-opt him, and try and target his seat for the party. And Dems should primary him, maybe w/ another Byrd like klansman
No, he's not. But his state has swung heavily Republican since the Dem's declared war on coal, and he can either do what he can to retain his seat, or throw his lot w/ his party leadership and be out of his current job
There is a clause in the WTO licensing deal covering medical patents. Every national govt has the right to invoke it have a particular drug's patent suspended and have it manufactured as a generic if it is considered a public health emergency. For a drug where there is no alternative, which is shown to work and where the company is being unreasonable, the govt can always pull out the big gun. The US govt doesn't as its bought my Pharma lobbyists.
**Life is too short to be serious**
It is interesting*, in hindsight, recalling the talk of "death panels" citizens of countries with socialized medicine must supposedly suffer through.
* Footnote left as an exercise for the reader
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
We've had antitrust laws for over a century now, since Standard Oil was using similar tactics against competition. New "regulations" since then are mostly junk...
Law-suits brought by the unfairly injured competitor seems like the best means of resolving these problems.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is the very point of Law. It's meant to be a fixed, predefined standard. It's meant to apply to all. It's meant to affect an action, not a person, sometimes the goal being to eliminate the action from existence entirely. Murder is addressed, murder is defined, murder is quantified, with no respect to who the particular Alice and Bob were. Justice is blind.
Selective enforcement and selective lawwriting are then the polar opposite. It is the antithesis of law. We have interpreters, arbiters, interpreting and being arbitrary. Justice is what the judge had for lunch.
That's not a joke, that's been studied. Parole rates are increased in the window after judges have eaten.
The rest is, as they say, algebra. When you have an influence'able factor in any given system, it will be influenced by the most influential influences. Obviously. The slightly-less obvious is what that means in practice: Justice to those who afford it, laws to those who lobbybuy them.
This is the same problem with the "free market" catch22. There will never be a free market because (even without malicious intent) capitalism leads to concentrated power. Capital begets capital. The balance will shift in favor of greater weights, naturally. Conditions will drift towards self-optimizing. Conditions will favor those that most influence them.
It's just nature - no, it's simpler, it's linear cause and effect. Evolution happens fastest with frequent breeding, and capitalism favors wealth concentration, naturally and then again artificially, through naturally-evolving effects.
I'm not proposing a solution to capitalism or justice-for-some, just observing inevitability, because sometimes I see people pretend reality is otherwise. Warm air rises and influences self-optimize. Of course they do.
We need to start doing what used to be done to corporations when they egregiously misbehaved: revoke the corporate charter.
Well, when all the people who need it have died, and that limitation is mostly pruned from the human branch of evolution, then the companies will no longer have a large market and they will have to reduce prices to meet the reduced demand. See, market forces always work! /s
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Sigh... It's sad to watch the "peanut panic" crowd -- the people who claim all sorts of wild stats about allergy deaths unsupported by evidence -- and the companies that make money by giving them a soapbox. This US/UK-centered phenomenon is a cultural and economic situation, not a medical one. According to the Centers for Disease Control/CDC researchers and American Medical Association/AMA's actual reputable scientists (not med mfr salespeople), the verified death rate from the relevant allergens has been consistent for 50+ years, as long as they've been keeping statistics. No significant rise.
What *has* happened is the massive thousand-fold rise in the number of people *diagnosed* with *some* anaphalactic reaction to peanuts and a zillion other irritants. When more people get *informed* there is a risk, the risk gets wildly exaggerated because of medical liability to any medical provider that does not address the completely-consistent-not-rising remote possibility of fatal reaction. And that translates into sales of expensive epi-pens from the company that conveniently funded the first and oft-cited major study into peanut allergy. And keeps funding other shoddy whitepapers on the topic. And keeps raising prices.
These guys are thieves. Those people are fools. Nothing new under the sun.
I think not...(*poof*)
What? WV elected a Democrat?
Well, whatever they actually did, they were accused of jacking their prices back up after driving the competition away.
This is one of those cases, when the facts do not really matter, ha-ha, only the public perception does...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
To me this sounds like it was about power and monopoly. That's a bit worse than just greed, which is bad enough on its own. But I'll grant that there was a large component of greed in the actions.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Money is a medium of exchange that equates my work to yours.. crafted so that we all add to the social value that the currency represents. Or .. that what I had heard. Did this Martin Shkreli dipweed start or just hilite the greed that is making healthcare too expensive? Good money for Good service, but aspirin does not cost $10. per tab and any Asswipe that thinks thats a good idea needs to be held accountable.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Yeah, I have an improvement. I'll bring it to market in 20 years after it receives approval and all of Mylan's patent infringement lawsuits are exhausted. That's if I don't go bankrupt first. It's a fucking plastic syringe with a spring in it.
Which wouldn't be quite a problem if a generic was out, or expected out anytime soon--have you seen some of what the FDA insists of generics? It's got to be 'exact same,' which has actually caused designs that are improvements to get bounced.
Yes. Because the concept of a "generic" is that it is marketed as identical to the brand name product except for the brand.
If they are not identical there could be cases where substituting the generic for the brand name or vice versa is DANGEROUS. And thefore marketing them as identical is dangerously misleading. If the drug company has an improvement they should get the new improved drug approved. They can even patent it if they want (they might have to license the base drug/process in order to produce their improved variant).
I can tell you don't actually know what you're talking about!
First off, the generic is not necessarily identical, it normally is just substantially identical, as in "it has the exact same stats." It isn't necessarily a perfect clone, it's literally the sort of difference you get between a brand name product and something that's, well, not...and on occasions you will have perfectly valid medical reasons to prefer to go on-brand (or off, depending) such as allergies.
So, moving on. EpiPens are actually not that reliable in function--I forget what the failure rate is, but it's actually disturbingly high--and merely having your generic version simply work reliably is sufficient for the FDA to reject it as a generic.
Second, getting anything in the way of a medical device through the current FDA approval process is a Kafkaesque nightmare, especially when it's just a minor improvement on previous iterations as the FDA don't care, you're doing the testing from scratch. This is precisely why there's sometimes a distinct effort to avoid having the FDA decide to wave its magic wand over something and declare it a medical device--especially since yes, the absurdity implied by Kafkaesque is definitely present.
This is pretty much what is wanted when you're out to get regulatory capture: You get the regulations written so as to effectively ensure that you have little to no competition. Deregulation actually is not something Mylan would want--because if you made the regulations reasonable, they would have to actually spend money on things like making better EpiPens.
What is/was Sanofi charging for their competing product?
Sounds like it really may be past time to curb corporate crap of every kind!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.