“I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients who may have ended up paying the full wholesale acquisition cost or more”, Mrs. Bresch told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
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“This hearing is critical because yet another drug company, Mylan, has jacked up the price of a lifesaving product for no discernible reason - and I did read your testimony, Miss Bresch, I was and not impressed - they raised the prices, the reason being, I believe, to get filthy rich at the expense of our constituents”, said Cummings.
To appease critics, the company has also chose to soon begin selling the device as a generic drug at a price of $300 – half the price of the EpiPen.
Mylan CEO Heather Bresch was on Capitol Hill Wednesday, facing questions about the dramatic increase in the cost of the Epipen.
Bresch defended the price hikes by saying that the company only makes about $100 off of every 2-pack of Epipens sold. “This is simply not true”, Ms. Bresch says.
She also argues that Mylan doesn’t profit as much as might be expected given the list price.
According to Reuters, the EpiPen made up billion of Mylan’s $9.45 billion in annual sales in 2015, which accounted for approximately 20 percent of its profit.
“I think you all have behaved very badly and invited government regulation”, Farenthold lectured the CEO. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican committee chairman, asked her at the hearing in Washington.
Bresch, the daughter of Democratic West Virginia Sen. It came months after “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, appeared in the same chamber because he increased the price of a decades-old drug called Darparim from $13.50 to $750 a pill.
John Duncan, the Republican representative for Tennessee’s second district, said the amount of money Bresch has personally made from soaring profitability of EpiPen was “sickening [and] disgusting”. Chaffetz said the salaries for Bresch and other executives at the firm “doesn’t add up for a lot of people”. He questioned whether Mylan would change course in any way following the backlash over its pricing.
Bresch claimed Mylan responded appropriately to the criticism by offering an authorized generic version of EpiPen taking the current price of $608 for two doses down to $300.
“We don’t want to go back to a time – not that long ago – when awareness of anaphylaxis was much lower and epinephrine auto injectors were only available in schools with a prescription for an individual child”, she says. That’s a 671 percent increase. USA Today recently reported that Manchin’s wife and Bresch’s mother, Gayle Manchin, had started an effort to have EpiPens placed in schools across the United States, which may have increased their popularity in school settings, allegations Bresch flatly denied today.
“I feel like you’re not giving me answers, ma’am”, Cummings said at a later point. That brought in sales of almost $1.7 billion for Mylan, though the company says it only receives about $1.1 billion after rebates and fees paid to insurers, distributors and other health care businesses.
Bresch, whose father is Sen.
The Food and Drug Administration’s Dr. Douglas Throckmorton, deputy director for regulatory programs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, was also present at the hearing, but was the subject of little questioning. Just this week, Senate Republicans called for a probe of whether Mylan had received tens of millions of dollars of excessive rebates from the federal Medicaid program.
The FDA’s Doug Throckmorton tried to defend the agency, explaining that it has almost worked through its backlog of generic applications and is on target for conducting 10-month reviews of ANDAs. Those changes also gave Mylan renewed patent protection for EpiPen, insulating it from possible generic competition despite the fact that the drug was first approved almost three decades ago.
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New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas’ office has sent an investigatory letter requesting information from the manufacturer of life-saving EpiPen.
