WASHINGTON (AP) – Mylan CEO Heather Bresch infuriated lawmakers as she tried – and mostly failed – to explain steep cost increases of her company’s life-saving EpiPens.
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Since Mylan bought the rights to EpiPen in 2008, the price has gone from around $100 for a pair of pens to around $600 for a two-pack.
Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland is the ranking member on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
United States politicians have accused the boss of drug company Mylan of attempting to get “filthy rich” by “jacking up” the price of life-saving allergy treatment EpiPen.
“We raised the price over eight years”, she said, “And I think what is incorrectly assumed is that $608 is what Mylan receives”.
Chaffetz said the lack of competition in the market contributed to the situation and that families were forced to incur the increasingly high cost for a drug that is often not covered by insurers. He also pointed out that the FDA has approved four other epinephrine injector products, two of which are still on the market.
“The EpiPen clearly is profitable at prices far lower than Mylan’s USA prices”, Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement.
“But in a way, you’ve done us a favor”, he said, “by showing us what’s wrong with the health care system”.
Mylan Pharmaceuticals CEO Heather Bresch told lawmakers that the company is reformulating the EpiPen to have a longer shelf life.
Outraged Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday grilled Bresch about the emergency allergy shot’s sky-high price and the profits for a company with sales in excess of $11 billion.
“Looking back, I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients”, Bresch read aloud from a statement to the committee.
“We never intended this”, she says. They also faulted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for moving too slowly to allow competing products to reach the market.
Bresch replied that Mylan had increased children’s access to EpiPens by giving over 700,000 EpiPens to schools across the country. “Achieving this level of expansion of awareness requires significant investment”.
Committee Chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) disagreed, arguing with Bresch the company would actually make more money by offering the generic product because it’s profit under the brand name is $274.00. Cummings said the company’s tactic was to “get filthy rich at the expense of our constituents”.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is among several lawmakers who have asked the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate whether Mylan is paying enough in Medicaid rebates.
In February, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. said the FDA had rejected the company’s application for a generic version of Mylan’s product.
While Bresch pointed to Mylan’s response in expanding its patient assistance program (PAP) and its “unprecedented” step to offer an authorized generic at a 50 percent discount, lawmakers countered with her almost $19 million salary and the fact that the Epipen generates 9 percent of the profit for a company that markets 2,700 different products. But critics have said the coupons, discount cards and patient assistance programs aren’t real solutions because many customers won’t use them or won’t qualify for them.
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Cummings asked Bresch, “You agree that you made hundreds of millions of dollars based on EpiPen” in 2015? Before rebates, EpiPen costs for Medicare Part D increased more than 1,000 percent between 2007 and 2014, from $7 million to $87.9 million, the report said.
