“While the price of EpiPen shot up exponentially, so did Ms. Bresch’s paycheck and the lavish compensation of her fellow executives at Mylan”, U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said at the hearing. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., tried to quell the fury by casting the image of a company that makes a life-saving device. “After subtracting all EpiPen Auto-Injector related costs our profit is $100, or approximately $50 per pen”. Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican accused Bresch and Mylan of downplaying the company’s profits, yet paying company executives hundreds of millions. She had 15 different positions as she worked herself up, she said. Not when your total salary and compensation have gone from around $2.5 million when you were the company president nine years ago to nearly $19 million as the CEO in 2015. The company’s CEO, Heather Bresch, is due to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee today regarding EpiPen price increases – for which MYL has been lambasted in recent months. That would cut out some of the middlemen who influence the list price.
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In response to Rep. Chaffetz’s claims, Ms. Bresch retorted the company does not make $600 off of their $608 drug. “What have you done to earn a 67 percent increase?”
Heather Bresch had a rough day yesterday.
“What have you done?” she said. The EpiPens have to be provided by the family for both the school nurse’s office and the leader of any activities, one for school and each additional event, as well as one to be carried by the family member. Several members invoked “basic economics” to say that since the quantity of EpiPens increased in the market, price should have gone down.
At the Mylan hearing, Representative Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina Republican, gestured at his colleagues and said many of them had little idea about business or how the corporate world worked.
It is a neat monopoly the company has carved out for itself, especially since competitors developing generic versions of the drug have for one reason or another been forced out of the market.
“They’re just begging us to look deeper”, Chaffetz said following the hearing.
The actual numbers, of course, depend on how available Mylan makes the generic to consumers. “If your loved one needs this, it better darn well be in your backpack”. She said there is a misunderstanding about the profitability of the treatment, which is stocked by individuals and by many schools around the country and requires regular replacement when it expires. “This is simply not true”, said Bresch in her prepared remarks, according to the Consumerist. That’s what Gayle Manchin would do. “And we’ve just now lowered that price by half”, Bresch said.
Manchin spokesman Jonathan Kott declined to comment further on Wednesday and did not respond when asked if Manchin was watching his daughter’s questioning.
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Bresch gave $53,000 to her father’s campaigns in his Senate special election campaign in 2010 and his campaign for a full term in 2012, according to the Federal Election Commission. But, despite the extraordinary price hike, Bresch isn’t apologizing or lowering the EpiPen’s price. In the pharmaceutical industry this is often hard, not because there aren’t competitors willing to jump in, but because the barriers to entry imposed by the Food and Drug Administration are so high. “I think it would have to be pushed into the next session”, Cummings told Inside Health Policy . “You take your punches but then go on and keep raising the prices. They did not do that”, TheStreet’s Jim Cramer said of Mylan on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” this morning. “Meanwhile, our constituents file for bankruptcy and watch their children get sicker or die”.
