The $400 EpiPen

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

I've seen several articles on this subject recently. Its become this week's source of Internet outrage.
Mylan, over the course of several years, managed to corner the market on the EpiPens. They lack no competition and have raised prices on the pen from $57 in 2007 to $400.
Below is a solid synopsis of how this happened.

Mylan is former US-Based (W.Va-based) company now HQ'd in the Netherlands. Its CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin. She was also at the center of an academic scandal that brought down a president of WVU.

Mylan acquired the EpiPen when it bought a group of medications from drug company Merck in 2007. At the time, the product only produced about $200 million in revenue. Today, according to Bloomberg, it makes about $1 billion per year for the formerly US-based company, now headquartered in the Netherlands after a corporate inversion last year.
The EpiPen is no longer covered by patent protection, but it still has no real competitors. Auvi-Q, the only thing that came close, was recalled for delivering faulty dosages almost a year ago. A competing drug company, Teva, didn’t win approval for its generic version of the EpiPen this year. Teva won’t try to win FDA approval again until at least 2017.
So what can a company like Mylan do to increase profits on an old product, like EpiPen, when it’s already captured 98 percent market share and has no real competitors?
One option is to increase prices. The second is to increase the size of the market by convincing regulators, like the FDA, that the product should be marketed directly to a wider swath of the population. Then, a company can swoop in with high-profile (albeit backdoor) endorsements, from people like Sarah Jessica Parker, to increase awareness about the conditions that EpiPen treats. Or, better still, why not push to have institutions like public schools incentivized under federal law to carry the product? Mylan has spent the past decade doing all of the above.

http://gizmodo.com/how-congress-the-fda-and-sarah-jessica-parker-helped-1785568792

 

[Lugnuts]

Mr. Lugs and I had been wondering WTF happened.

One of the Lil' Lugs has a tree nut allergy.

First it was almond, then it increased to all the tree nuts...

THEN it decreased.

All that's left are pistachio, hazelnut and pecan, thank goodness.

There's hope it'll go away.

But every public school, every camp and every activity requires multiple EpiPens. Plus I have to carry one.

And the damn things EXPIRE after a year.

So the past couple of years I noticed the price going up.

Well a couple of months ago, I went to get the refills-- and thank God we've never had to use one....

And the damn things are $450. I got the package, and I laughed at the pharmacy and said, "Ha ha, very funny. Now run this through insurance."

And they were like, "We did."

And I was like, "That ****er Shkreli is at it again."

Little did I know it really WAS something like that.

Seriously... this is just wrong.

A lot of kids need the Epi so they don't go into shock and stop breathing.

Life threatening allergies are on the rise, and we don't know why.

But until we figure this out, we can't have the drug companies gouging.

 

[HC]

A friend now living in Germany posted the story on Facebook and noted that this increase in only in America.

 

[bigpern23]

My nephew has a severe, life-threatening peanut allergy. Fortunately, his parents are able to afford the price increase, but it's still incredibly absurd. My friend was at CVS the other day and the guy in front of him was told his out-of-pocket costs for a pair of EpiPens was $684. The guy couldn't afford it and walked.

Looks like Congress is going to investigate. Hopefully they get the costs back down. These things literally cost like a buck to make.

 

[Riptide]

Mylan cannot foresee the giant ****storm when kids start dying because Mommys can't buy medicine?

 

[Michael_ Gee]

The CEO of the company is the daughter of Sen. Manchin (D. -- West Va.). Yeah, Congress will do plenty.

 

[heyabbott]

Mylan cannot foresee the giant ****storm when kids start dying because Mommys can't buy medicine?

Bull****. It won't matter to the company. It's all about capitalism. If daddy didn't want his baby to die he should have worked harder

 

[Dyno]

My co-worker is a struggling single mom with a teenage daughter who almost died from an out of the blue allergic reaction to pine nuts earlier this year. She cannot afford the multiple EpiPens she now needs for her daughter. She was practically in tears talking about this just the other day. I think some of us are going to chip in and pay for them. Just outrageous.

 

[LongTimeListener]

I remember Heather Bresch from that WVU scandal.

Even back then, she was a thoroughly horrible person.

 

[Human_Paraquat]

My SO has a nut allergy diagnosed later in life -- peanuts and tree nuts. She's only ever had one reaction that sent her to urgent care because she felt her throat closing up after eating some pecan clusters a reader had sent to the paper. Prior to that she'd eaten various nuts her whole life.

Her current epi pens are expired because she can't afford to replace them. She's single and has a good job and extra income from renting her second room out to a roommate. Can't imagine what this is like for parents with kids with serious allergies whose situation isn't as favorable.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

Mylan cannot foresee the giant ****storm when kids start dying because Mommys can't buy medicine?

Mylan has also kind of increased the demand for EpiPens by frightening folks ...

EpiPen is an emergency medication that’s stabbed into a person experiencing anaphylactic shock, a life-threatening allergic reaction that can be triggered by anything from bee stings to food. I’ve never used an EpiPen, but as someone with a peanut allergy who once made his own trip to the ER after a particularly unfortunate restaurant experience (“these Chinese beans sure are crunchy...”) I can tell you that anaphylactic shock is really no fun.And while it’s incredibly scary, the worst case scenario is exceedingly rare: Between 1999 and 2009, deaths from anaphylactic shock in the United States ranged from 186 to 225 deaths per year. To put that in perspective, about 4,800 American adults die from choking on their food every year. But Mylan hasn’t yet found a way to extract $1 billion from the Heimlich maneuver.

 

[User 11148]

What's wrong with generic Adrenaclick? You can get a package of two injectors at Walmart for around $150 to $200 ...

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

Wages increased $2m-$19m for CEO of company that price-hiked EpiPens

Bresch got a little raise.

 

[Lugnuts]

Here's another lil' problem.

We have all these millions of EpiPens, right?

And .0000001 % of the them ever get used, correct ?

So these things expire after a year... and NOBODY will take the old ones.

I've tried to get the pharmacy to dispose of them. Nope. Doctors won't take them. No thanks.

I was told to throw them in the garbage or contact the DEA for their "drug disposal day."

If thrown in the garbage all that epinephrine ultimately makes its way into the water supply.

Nice thought, huh ?

 

[SpeedTchr]

I would love to know what has caused the increase in nut allergies since I was a kid. It was basically unheard of then. The only situations requiring the use of something like the EpiPen back then were bee stings.

 

[cjericho]

I would love to know what has caused the increase in nut allergies since I was a kid. It was basically unheard of then. The only situations requiring the use of something like the EpiPen back then were bee stings.

Wondered about that also. Can't remember one kid from 1st through 8th grade who had a nut allergy. From relatives and friends who are teachers it seems there are two or more in each of their classes every year.

 

[Spartan Squad]

There's a theory that such things are literally first world problems. We've such a good job at eliminating certain dangers from our environment that now our bodies don't know how to handle alergines. So you see a rise in autoimmune diseases and allergies where if you live in the third world you don't see it. Some have gone so far as to expose themselves to parisites on the belief that it will eliminate their allergies.

 

[FileNotFound]

Free market.

 

[dixiehack]

I've noticed a college friend who is a B-school professor has interrupted her summer of Gary Johnson love on Facebook to flog this story hard in recent days, culminating in yesterday's post where she wanted them banned from selling in the US and their patents revoked. It was, to put it mildly, quite the sea change.

 

[User 11148]

Free market.

Not quite ...