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Clinton Wants to Prevent ‘Excessive’ Drug Prices

Clinton plans to create a drug-pricing oversight group that will monitor price increases.

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The plan released Friday on the candidate’s website adds to a year of attacks against pharmaceutical firms that have hiked the prices of life-saving treatments, including the outcry over Mylan’s EpiPen emergency allergy shot. The company said Monday it will soon introduce a generic version of EpiPen for $300 a two-pack.

Two key USA congressional committee members on Friday called for an investigation into whether Mylan NV, under fire for raising the price of its EpiPen device, overcharged the government’s low-income healthcare program for the allergy treatment.

“But I’m ready to hold drug companies accountable when they try to put profits ahead of patients, instead of back into research and innovation”.

“She’s had a long history of controversy, with her fake degree, with other price issues that they have gotten in trouble for in the past”, rally organizer Andrew Szanto told a local television station, referring to an MBA degree Ms. Bresch had claimed from West Virginia University but did not earn. She plans to fine or increase rebates from pharmaceutical companies who increase drug prices to unjustified amounts. “This is exactly the kind of campaign headline risk that we have been telling investors to expect from the fall campaign”.

In fact some analysts pointed out that when Mylan, the manufacturer of the EpiPen, hiked the price 31 percent in 2015, its net revenue on sales dropped 1 percent.

An “unjustified”, outlier price increase would be based on three criteria, including the trajectory of the price increase, cost of production and value to patients. Consumers need to be rescued from that avarice with competition making prices for making health care products, not just those for allergy sufferers, more reasonable.

“Companies commonly give their executives incentives by linking their pay to earnings or stock-price goals, and companies are free to raise prices as they see fit”.

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GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley spearheaded a bipartisan effort in the upper chamber to call on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve an alternative to the EpiPen to increase competition and drive down prices. Most recently, Mylan, the producer of EpiPen, has come under sharp scrutiny for raising the cost of the lifesaving tool that relaxes muscles in the midst of a severe allergic reaction by 500%. The comments also preceded broader losses in the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index, which fell 3.4 percent the same day. Given price increases take place on nearly every drug, what will be deemed excessive. It mentioned Turing Pharmaceuticals owner Martin Shkreli, who purchased the manufacturing license of antiparasitic drug Daraprim used by HIV patients and drove the price up from $13 a tablet to $750.

Where are the generic alternatives to Epi Pen and other expensive drugs that have lost patent protection