Mark Baum believes the relentless EpiPen price hikes are “shameful” and his company is plotting a $100 alternative for the lifesaving allergy treatment. While the cost of the EpiPen rose 500 percent since 2007, Bresch’s salary also increased exponentionally.
Advertisement
Now those who pay the full price of $600 are often able to use a co-pay card to bring that cost down to $300.
The company said customers with high out-of-pockets costs could get a $300 coupon, cutting the cost in half, and then it authorized a generic version that will retail for $300. The product will be available as a two-pack carton, with versions containing 0.15 and 0.30 mg of epinephrine, which is used to quickly treat the severe allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis.
Bresch continued, “Ensuring access to medicine is absolutely the core of Mylan’s mission and has been since our founding 55 years ago”. “This is not 1987 or the fictitious movie ‘Wall Street, ‘ greed is not always good”.
Parents doing back-to-school preparations encountered sticker shock at pharmacy counters this month and began protesting to politicians and on social media, leading to an uproar in an election year when drug prices already are a hot issue and other drugmakers have been blasted for astronomical price hikes. In January, Gov. Chris Christie signed the senator’s bill extending the same requirements to state youth camps.
But Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, and 19 Senate Democrats doubled down on their criticism Tuesday, saying the discounts amounted to a “complex shell game” that drug makers play. But the price may also be low enough to deter others from taking on the risk and expense of developing their own generics.
Manchin’s daughter, Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, told CNBC Thursday that lowering the price wasn’t an option.
“But let’s face it”, he continued, “in the drug business there’s a monopoly granted by the government. through patents, through FDA marketing exclusivity and FDA regulation, which takes a long time to approve a line to produce drugs”. In this case, the pen will be the same, but the packaging might be a different color or carry just the “epinephrine auto-injectors” title.
There is a petition going around called Stop The EpiPen Price Gouging.
“But they don’t seem to learn because the profit it too tempting”, said Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, it should be noted that Bresch got a healthy pay raise a year ago to a base salary of $1.3 million and a total compensation package of $18.9 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
