“It’s wrong when drug companies put profits ahead of patients, raising prices without justifying the value behind them”, the Democratic presidential nominee said in a statement on her Facebook page.
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That is changing as Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the American Medical Association and a number of USA senators are calling on Bresch to roll back the steep price hikes on EpiPens.
Politicians, from Senator Bernie Sanders to Senator Amy Klobuchar, have questioned Mylan’s price hike on the EpiPen and called for investigations into the situation.
A spokeswoman for Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said Wednesday that who Mylan’s CEO is “has no bearing on Sen”.
Chief executive officer Heather Bresch said: “We recognise the significant burden on patients from continued, rising insurance premiums and being forced increasingly to pay the full list price for medicines at the pharmacy counter”. Bresch’s pharmaceutical company not only hiked the price of the EpiPen by 400 percent, but her father is Democratic Sen.
Clinton also criticized Turing Pharmaceuticals in the fall of 2015 when public ire rose after it chose to raise the price of an antiviral medication commonly used by AIDS patients and pregnant women from $13.50 a tablet to $750 each. “From other Iowans I have heard concerns about the cost of EpiPens and the need to replace them once a year when they expire”.
“There have been numerous accounts of individuals who are simply unable to afford this lifesaving medication and as a outcome have gone without, risked using an expired product, or resorted to uncertain (but less expensive) treatments”, they wrote.
Underlying reasons for the price increase – and for high drug prices in the USA generally – may be found in a study published Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Clinton called the pricing strategy “outrageous”.
The pharmaceutical company that distributes the EpiPen is also a Clinton Foundation donor.
The EpiPen controversy follows a similar controversy a year ago, when Martin Shkreli, chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, drastically raised the price of a key cancer and AIDS drug. “There’s no justification for these price hikes”.
He has proposed increasing the amount of negotiations permitted by Medicare in order to lower prices for those using the program.
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In the past few years, the cost of the EpiPen, which is used as a live-saving treatment for allergic reactions, has risen to $614 for two pens, up from $100 for the pair. As a mother wrote in the HuffingtonPost earlier this year, her family was shielded for years from the reality of how much Mylan was making off this mandate. She said the plan would require drug companies “to explain significant price increases, and prove that any additional costs are linked to additional patient benefits and better value”. The company also pointed to changing healthcare plans that have higher deductibles, leaving families on the hook for more of the prescription’s cost than in the past.
