Price-gouging Maker of EpiPen Literally Said That Critics Can Go Fuck Themselves (gizmodo.com) 459
Back in August of 2016, the pharmaceutical company Mylan came under fire for jacking up prices of the EpiPen from $57 in 2007 to roughly $600 in 2016. The public backlash has been significant. Gizmodo adds: But the chairman of Mylan has a message for any critics: Go fuck yourself. Well, at least that's what we think he said. The New York Times has a new article about the fact that prices for the live-saving allergy medication haven't actually come down since last year. And the article has a rather strange way of describing the attitude of Mylan chairman Robert Coury. This is how the New York Times describes Coury's reaction to critics of Mylan's price gouging: "Mr. Coury replied that he was untroubled. He raised both his middle fingers and explained, using colorful language, that anyone criticizing Mylan, including its employees, ought to go copulate with themselves. Critics in Congress and on Wall Street, he said, should do the same. And regulators at the Food and Drug Administration? They, too, deserved a round of anatomically challenging self-fulfillment."
That's difficult to do (Score:5, Funny)
I've never been in anaphylactic shock, but I would imagine it would be particularly difficult to engage in the suggested activity while suffering from an allergic reaction.
Perhaps someone could correct me though if I'm wrong.
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Re: That's difficult to do (Score:5, Informative)
There are varied degrees. I am allergic to bees. With most, I'll swell up and have some throat constriction. With a few, I'll have a reasonable amount of time to seek treatment. With a very small number, a single sting is enough to mean I need immediate treatment, or I will die. Most of the time, I won't need any treatment at all. I'll just have to calm down and ensure I keep breathing well enough.
If you're curious, I don't even bother carrying my shot kit. It is fairly unlikely that I will need it and there's usually one that I can access, if I have enough time.
I have an EpiPen (Score:5, Funny)
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Sometimes +5 Funny seems just not high enough. I wish the parent could be modded up to eleven.
Re:That's difficult to do (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps we should stick Mr. Coury's head in a beehive for a few minutes and then see if he can masturbate. Totally for science, of course!
Re:That's difficult to do (Score:5, Interesting)
The readily available components for this - a one-dose vial of epinephrine and an appropriate syringe - costs less than $10, less than $5 if you shop around. People are reluctant to use those because it's more complex and cumbersome than an epipen, but they should. Especially backup doses.
And items like this the USA should just declare eminent domain and manufacture/distribute them at cost. This goes for any patented medicine not made available in sufficient quantity and at cost with not more than reasonable profit.
Re:That's difficult to do (Score:5, Informative)
There are generic auto-injectors available at a reasonable price. There's just no reason to buy EpiPen, unless the kid's school is in on the scam.
Re:That's difficult to do (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately it is our FDA that is perpetuating this problem because they increased the certification standards on injectors which, unless someone coughs up and throws away millions of dollars for new testing, rules out using many older out-of-patent designs that are all-the-rage in other parts of the world (like western europe.)
Sure, this is price gouging. Plain and simple. But its the FDA's fault that a bunch of competing injector-based products disappeared from the market overnight.
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"And items like this the USA should just declare eminent domain and manufacture/distribute them at cost. This goes for any patented medicine not made available in sufficient quantity and at cost with not more than reasonable profit."
Disclaimer: I think what Mylan is doing is outrageous.
That said, I don't see how you're going to get pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs if you're going to take away the profit incentive. They spend a shit ton of money in development, and it takes years to get it all
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To recoup the R&D investment, reasonable revenues are sometimes billions of dollars.
Right. And they need to recoup the cost of marketing (all those commercials, the people who design and redesign the boxes, presentations and free samples for doctors) and lobbyists to make sure the competition is put out (and stays out) of business and lawyers to enforce the fruits of the lobbyists. And then the cost of the propagandists who quell the uprising when people start complaining about the 10,000% markup.
Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Insightful)
The epipen isn't the only player in the market, its popularity is due to schools support for it, as an easy way to administer the drug. If it is too expensive the schools should consider a replacement. And have this guy just blame critics in the poor house with a stack of epipens that he will sell at a loss.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Informative)
THIS! (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see why there is even a discussion about this. Market forces should already have reduced Mylan's sales of EpiPen to ZERO. There are alternatives. MUCH cheaper alternatives! Let Mylan ask whatever they want, just don;t buy from them.
Anyone with a prescription can purchase Adrenaclick(the EpiPen generic) for $60 from CVS Drugs. With this coupon. [trialcard.com]
The real ignorance and travesty is that ANYONE still buys EpiPen.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Informative)
A DIY option is the EpiPencil:
https://fourthievesvinegar.org... [fourthievesvinegar.org]
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Insightful)
That'd be all good and well, if there weren't patents preventing other players from entering the market.
Perhaps patents shouldn't last as ridiculously long for devices that save lives... ... just a thought.
I'm all for companies being paid to make up for R&D costs, but sometimes common sense should be observed.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just impose mandatory licensing on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms for medical patents, in a similar way to various standards bodies expecting this of contributors influencing the standards. You still get your commercial incentive to invest in research and development, you still get to make reasonable profits, but you don't get to literally hold people's lives hostage just because of a legal monopoly.
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I'm sure ideological studies have found what they were looking for.
But you've missed my point. It's not about "R&D costs", it's specifically about the venture capitalists getting their 20-1 returns on funding risky startups, which can only happen if the big companies (that do little of value, other than sell at scale) know they'll make absurd amounts from those acquired startups.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right. We should do something to steer people away from making life saving devices and instead incentivize them to spend their efforts making iphones which can be patented for longer and make more money.
They were making a profit at $67 an epipen. There is a profit to be made at that margin. If a profit can be made, someone will take it.
Re: Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can Congress nullify a patent? (Score:4, Interesting)
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They cancelled Bayer's Asprin patents after WWII, to punish Bayer for helping the Nazis, so there is already some legal precedent.
Challenged? Isn't it at their "discretion"? (Score:3)
Why do you think it could be challenged?
In Eldred v. Ashcroft [wikipedia.org], the court affirmed that Congress is sovereign in settings patent and copyright terms.
If Congress is sovereign in lengthening the term(s), would not Congress be sovereign in setting any terms they choose to zero?
From the wiki: "However, the major argument for the act that carried over into the case was that the Constitution specified that Congress only needed to set time limits for copyright, the length of which was left to their discretion."
If z
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Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Informative)
That'd be all good and well, if there weren't patents preventing other players from entering the market.
If only there were already competing devices out there, for 1/6th of the price, that would solve this entire problem. https://theoutline.com/post/88... [theoutline.com]
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Interesting)
How does that address the patent issue?
My point was that the maker of the linked device obviously figured out a way around the EpiPen patent.
I am 100% behind patent reform, the system needs work, I get that. But the inventor of the EpiPen device actually did create a better way for people to inject themselves, I think that deserves patent protection. But now, that patent (assuming its this one [google.com]) is 10 years old, probably about time for that device to become public domain.
In my googling I came up with this interesting article, explaining why they feel that patents aren't the issue here. http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2016... [ipwatchdog.com] (I don't know a thing about ipwatchdog, up to you if you take the article at face value or not. Their points seemed valid.)
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There is no patent issue.
There is a brand recognition issue. EpiPen has multiple competitors, even domestically in the U.S., one of which is 6x cheaper and sold in CVS. But people find EpiPen synonymous with the PRODUCT, and many - even doctors - don't know that there are competitors because EpiPen has done such successful marketing for so long.
Just like Kleenex. You don't ask for a facial tissue, you ask for a Kleenex. Even if you have a box of facial tissues branded by someone else (like Proctor and G
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It needs to be a substitution of the product. Not a copy. Lets say that autoinjector is the best on the market. However an other one can be made, that may not be as good, but good enough. And if by that it costs 5 times less then it is more valuable, then its more expensive counterpart.
The top selling cars are the Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Ford and Chevy not because they are the best cars on the market. But good cars for the money that pay for them. I could give up a home mortgage to get myself a
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Government should revoke the patent when it is being abused.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Insightful)
Government should revoke the patent when it is being abused.
Except that patents were designed with abuse as their very purpose since the very start. Check out for example the backlash against them in 1624 [wikipedia.org].
The reason patents are advertised for did not pass the laugh test in any period of history. Try for example Edison and light bulbs: all he did was a minor improvement over what a long list of other researchers did, yet by abusing patents he stopped innovation for about 50 years.
Re: Government should just drop the product. (Score:3)
There are alternatives. Mylan has a patent on that particular design of auto-injector. There are other auto-injectors and the active ingredient (epinephrine) has been off patent for years.
Re: Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Interesting)
Good luck. The others tend to be out of stock or pulled from the market due to dosage problems.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Informative)
The epipen isn't the only player in the market, its popularity is due to schools support for it, as an easy way to administer the drug. .
The schools have support for it because they are legally required to do so. Schools are legally required to carry epinephrone pens, and Mylan took steps to become the dominant player in the epinephrine autoinjector market; so much so that "epipen" is now on the same level as kleenex, bandaid, or xerox in that it is now essentially a generic term for any epinephrine injector pen. Oh, yeah, and one of their top executives also happens to be the daughter of a senator. I'm sure that didn't have any bearing when it came to lobbying efforts.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the whole epi-pen thing is blatant rent-seeking [congress.gov]. Get your product legally required, get alternatives stuck in regulatory and patent limbo, jack up the price and rake in the bucks.
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There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't vote for the "Republican" guys either. I'm just pointing out, that people that like to equate (R) with evil and corrupt every time some Chairman of some company is Republican and does something evil, are the same people who make excuses when it is a (D) doing it.
Your case just proves my point. When everything the left hates is "Political" and when it is something that shines poorly upon the (D), it is "Get Fucked trying to make this political".
Being a Libertarian, I understand the dangers of political manipulation of the Economy, at both the micro and macro points of the model. I am actually probably, on your side on this one. However, my solution isn't "more government control" and "Regulation" it is less. You see, since the whole problem was caused by government regulation in the first place (half dozen key regulations in fact). But that doesn't work for liberals who think that the first and only solution to a problem is "MOAR GOVERNMENT".
And here is a key fact, there are other ways to administer Epinephrine besides EpiPen. In fact there are several "open source" style kits out there that do the same kind of thing, for a whole lot less money.
http://www.consumerreports.org... [consumerreports.org]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-h... [ieee.org]
Instead of whining about EpiPen costs, vote with your dollars and get the less expensive version of your choice. And ask that the Government deregulate the mandates to use EpiPens.
The key to power is information and choice. Government regulations that remove "choices" are to blame here. But so is being lazy, and not getting the information you need to make the choices you could be making.
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Or the government should just invalidate their patent and open the ball-game. Basically tell Mylan they can go fuck themselves, and they will soon have plenty of time to do so. Patents aren't natural rights of man, they're arbitrarily granted government monopolies created to encourage R&D, not to be abused in the name of greed.
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Why would they do that ? They make more money this way.
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it should be easy to convince your local school board to purchase the alternatives to save costs
Purchasing the alternatives won't save costs when Mylan is giving the Epipen to schools for free. I don't think it will be so easy to convince anyone sitting on a local school board that a positive nonzero cost is less than a zero cost, nor will it be easy to convince them to take on that cost in the face of budget constraints to the point that many school districts no longer even offer buses.
Re:Government should just drop the product. (Score:4, Insightful)
easy to convince them to take on that cost in the face of budget constraints to the point that many school districts no longer even offer buses
Seriously, anyone who has ever been a to a school board budget meeting in their local community know busing is almost always the FIRST thing to be suggested for cuts. why? Because most people who serve on school boards are cynical bastards and know the easiest way get more money and its always more money, the per pupil costs never go down, is to inconvenience the parents. Nothing could do that better than killing student transportation. God for bid we don't have 10 librarians assistants per school no...or another computer lab teachers never let students actually use.
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I really hope (Score:2)
Re:I really hope (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with doctors and other end-providers doing well for themselves. I also don't have a problem with people who invent things making some real money from their inventions. After all, those who invent life-saving devices and those that have the knowledge and skills to save lives are doing some pretty amazing things. What I do have a problem with is all of the middlemen, that act to hand-off something, without really contributing, and siphoning-off their cut as they do it.
I suppose this is why I support single-payer. I've heard arguments about choice in one's insurance company, I've heard arguments about being being worried about being denied treatment for something. Thing of it is, most people do not have choice in their insurance providers as they're limited to what their employers provide, and those insurers themselves limit the doctors available for affordable pricing (ie, which doctors have come to terms with the insurer), and the companies themselves already have things like stipulations against pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps on expenditures per patient.
As far as I am concerned, if we already have numerous redundant bureaucracies that are bloated, inefficient, and expensive as a side-effect of being profit-driven, then why don't we do away with that and go to a system with a single bureaucracy? Even if it is bloated and inefficient, it's still only one bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, and if it's not profit-driven then it will probably cost less to operate than the numerous private insurance companies. And if proper separation is reintroduced then suddenly basically all providers are available.
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No, private industry with a profit motive will always be more efficient than government bureaucrats with no motive at all for efficiency and service.
Take a look at the deadly mess that is the VA and tell me single payer is better.
Re:I really hope (Score:5, Informative)
No, private industry with a profit motive will always be more efficient
Will it?
Take a look at the deadly mess that is the VA and tell me single payer is better.
Everything around the military is always crap. You can justify anything by pounding on war drums. And hey, while we're at it, the VA (at least its health care arm) is one of the things which can go away if we have a single payer health care system.
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FYI: The Veterans Administration is not a part of, any military branch. It is a separate and distinct federal agency.
And no, single-payer won't make it go away... single-payer would simply use the VAMC infrastructure as a handy pre-existing government bureaucracy from which to run (and eventually own) the whole single-payer healthcare system. Path of least resistance and all that.
Of course, there will be promises that they'll make the VA more efficient, more responsive, less hazardous to life and limb, etc.
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I would expect that medicare and/or medicaid would actually form the basis for the expansion of universal payment for a single-payer system. The VA system has two missions, one of which is to directly provide care. That aspect has been shown to be fundamentally broken in several VA facilities in the country. It would make more sense to expand how coverage for payment for service is handled as a federal program than the actual care itself.
If anything it might make sense to reconsider the nature of the VA
Re:I really hope (Score:5, Informative)
You think that the government would be less bloated? We are talking about the government. They created the concept of ineffectual bloat and then expanded, enhanced and perfected it. The government home of the $50,000 hammer. No, private industry with a profit motive will always be more efficient than government bureaucrats with no motive at all for efficiency and service. Take a look at the deadly mess that is the VA and tell me single payer is better.
Are you talking about the bloat private companies invented to charge to the gov because they can get away with it? It's always going to be cheaper and better to have public services, if for nothing else no one is looking to profit off it and any extra money made goes back into the service or others. It's in private industry with a profit motive it's all but encouraged to cut service and increase price. If you truly think that's better you're deluded. I don't know about your VA but I'd be willing to bet most of it's problems will be caused by subcontracting to private companies.
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Most of the bloat that occurred is because for decades, Medicare/Medicaid happily paid what they were charged, without question. Same scam that universities are now partaking of with government-backed student loans, come to think of it.
Quite a few years back though, this no longer became the case with Medicare - to the point where nowadays, most doctors refuse to take on new Medicare patients.
Funny thing, though... most hospitals charge exorbitant rates because a huge chunk of their indigent ER/inpatient pa
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There's no single solution to the problem, and the mandate for care regardless of the ability to pay is part why emergency rooms are treated this way.
In a single-payer system with universal coverage paid-for by taxes that replace the current costs paid to maintain private insurance, basically everyone is covered and doctors don't have a lot of choice about participating. If they don't participate then they probably don't have incomes except for a few highly-specialized doctors catering as private physician
Re:I really hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I really hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Water treatment, purification, and distribution. Trash collection. Sewer service. In my state they operate a damn-good highway maintenance program, admittedly with the actual repair jobs being contracted, but the project management being centrally coordinated by a bureaucrat.
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There's only one industry that's even more corrupt and self-serving than the financial industry -- and that's health care.
Because in the good ol' US of A good health is a privilege, not a right.
Literally.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Change (Score:2)
I'll just wait (Score:4, Insightful)
At some point, this orifice at the negative end of the esophagus will be responsible for the untimely demise of a person who is mourned by someone with a rather low tolerance for bullshit of this kind, and this person of limited longanimity will rip said orifice a suitable replacement for the aforementioned orifice.
Preferably slowly, painfully and streamed via a service that many people can enjoy.
And nothing of value will be lost. Except maybe the YouTube video of it.
This sounds familiar... (Score:2)
Good (Score:3)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
At least one chairman who has balls to say what he actually thinks instead of hiding behind insincere excuses. On the other hand I hope he won't cry when his critics start using stronger language as well.
What you call "balls" I define as Corporate Arrogance, and quite frankly, I'm sick and fucking tired of it.
It's amazing how we have anti-monopoly laws on the books, and yet we don't really do a damn thing from stopping mega-corps from buying 90% of the market, and colluding with the remaining 10% that comprise the remaining mega-corps. True competition is dead or dying, and the arrogant attitudes demonstrated by the worlds largest corporations prove it.
I can only hope that 10 companies worth of real competition are birthed from this cocksuckers arrogance to compete directly against the EpiPen, and he's forced to eat his words standing in front of the shareholders explaining why revenue has tanked.
Capitalism and Greed does not justify this kind of shit attitude that has created Corporate Arrogance. And it's high time consumers stop bending over and simply taking it when it happens.
Lexmark (Score:3)
Now that patent rights are terminated with any domestic or foreign sale, per the SCOTUS Lexmark decision, pretty soon the market is going to be able to tell Coury to go fuck himself.
Re:Lexmark (Score:5, Insightful)
Congress has forced the FDA to block the sale of imported drugs, the same congress has also blocked the government from negotiating prices even though Medicare and Medicaid combined constitute 80% of all drug and device sales.
Allowing the reimport and negotiation of drug prices would bring US prices into line with the rest of the world.
Shine on you crazy diamond (Score:3)
I'll be in the minority here, but that's bad ass. A company leader that doesn't do PR is a breath of fresh air, even if he is a raging asshole.
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Except the job of CEO is to be a focal point and linkage between PR (the outside perceptions of the company) and the internal company culture.
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The job of CEO is to maximize shareholder profit. Everything else is in service to this goal.
It can certainly be argued that this douche nozzle is going to end up costing the board dearly, and you'd probably be right. That, however, is not my point. My point is it's nice to see someone in authority act like he has a set of balls and own their actions. Too many company leaders, when caught with their hands in the cookie jar, act like it's a mystery. They don't know how they got both hands and foot in th
He is right (Score:2)
The real villain is the FDA, which enables gouging (Score:2)
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Points for honesty (Score:2)
This guy gets points for honesty, boldness, and openly admitting that he's in the top 1% of the world's amoral socio/psychopathic douche-bags. It's nowhere near enough to make up for what happened, but most people in his situation would lie through their teeth to try to paint a better picture for themselves and their company.
Mylan will cease to be relevant in 8 years (Score:2)
I can't imagine that the chairman did the company any favors in the here and now by openly suggesting that people who criticize the company's price gouging can go "copulate with themselves", however.
Re:Mylan will cease to be relevant in 8 years (Score:5, Insightful)
when their patent expires.
It's not even their patent. Pfizer owns the patent and manufactures them. Mylan only holds the exclusive rights to market EpiPens in the USA [wikipedia.org].
It's time to drag both Pfizer, Mylan and the FDA into court on federal antitrust charges and collusion to keep other products and market channels available.
Invalidate the Patent(s) (Score:2)
Brilliant POS (Score:2)
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CVS to Mylan: fuck you too (Score:4, Informative)
We just picked up the generic Adrenaclick from CVS for $12 after they automatically applied a $100 off coupon (even without insurance). The major difference between Adrenaclick and EpiPen is that Adrenaclick doesn't retract the needle after injection. If Mylan's pricing nonsense continues I think we'll see more people being trained on Adrenaclick than EpiPen just due to the cost.
There's a simple answer to this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nationalize the pharmaceutical industry.
And go back to 1997, and BAN ALL C(ONSUMER_TARGETED ADVERTISING OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. They spend *billions* on that, and what, you're supposed to tell your doctor what to prescribe?
With all the mergers, they're spending a lot less on actual research. And the research they are doing - a year or two ago, India refused to grant a patent to a major drug, because it was no advance at all on the existing drug... that was about to go out of patent.
Hell, go look at the wikipedia entry on quinene, for malaria - how much it costs to make, and the price in the US.
That's their big research. Basic research? Try universities, a lot of whom get funding for that... from the biggest and best (IMO) medical and bioscientific research organization in the world: the US NIH.
Let's invoke the TRIPS agreement on Mulan (Score:3)
Bust his useless patent and let the generic manufacturers flood the market. The patent on such an obvious copy of the US Army nerve gas antidote injector was wrongly issued anyway.
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Knowing that 100% of your customers have insurance that pays 100% of the cost of medications is a green light for this type of price gouging.
In a situation where 100% of all prices are paid by a single entity, that entity has all the power. What does a company do when they jack the rates up 500% and the government says ok, we won't pay you? They either drop their prices or go out of business. They could simply refuse to offer their product in the US, but the then government could simply declare their patent open for generics. There wouldn't be a need for direct price controls, but there would be de facto price controls in that all providers
Canada has price controls (Score:4, Informative)
Canada has price controls
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No one is forced to buy the product. I suppose the real question is why would he want to price the product out of the market. And don't say greed. If it was as simple as that my neighborhood bar would charge $500 for a pint instead of $5.
If the bar owner raised his price so high wouldn't you wonder why? I would (OBVIOUSLY) stop going there and I can't see anyone else going there either. So
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No one is forced to buy the product.
So, fun fact, in the US, if your doctor writes a prescription for an Epipen, you CANNOT choose an alternative delivery method. So yes, there are a good number of people forced to buy the product.
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No one is forced to buy the product.
The problem is people are. That's how they can get away with this shit.
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That is the wrong message to tell Mylan.
The right message is to write to your congressman and FTC how Mylan is gouging you the voter, and that the congressman and gov't are doing such a poor job keeping Mylan in line that Mylan feels comfortable telling their constituents to "go fuck themselves".
At very least, it opens up an opportunity for someone to fuck over Mylan, if only with compulsory political donations.
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Re:They own it (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between something being legal and something being a good idea.
The pharma and biotech industries as a whole want to avoid price regulations but this kind of behavior heavily pushes politicians to look at passing laws to do that for consumer protection. That is why when Martin Shkreli raised the price of an AIDS medication by 5000% another company started to manufacture the same drug and sold it at only slightly above cost. The intention was to stave off new regulations by showing they could deal with bad actors as an industry and not harm patients in the process. My understanding is that the same thing is being worked on right now to get some more auto-injectors approved and drop the price way down in order to prevent tis from being used to regulate.
The problem is that some drugs are seriously expensive to make. Some of them require some difficult processes that making enough of the drug for one person for one year can cost $50K and that does not cover the cost of R&D that went into it. Typically those drugs would then sell for $100K or so. If you have price caps then many drugs would just not be made at all because they are at the edge of our technology and we don't know of a cheaper way to make them. Especially with biotech drugs you have to connect together tens of thousands of atoms essentially perfectly. You need to make on the order of 10^24 of the molecules and your defect rate has to be 0.001%. There is nothing else on our planet that is manufactured to those kinds of standards and it is HARD and EXPENSIVE. The prices are coming down on them as technology gets better but mostly what happens is that even harder molecules are made.
It really bothers me when I see a company that makes a drug for $0.50 and then sells it for $100+ because it puts the entire industry at risk. I don't want to see DNA, RNA and protein based drugs going away because they no longer fit within price caps.
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What most people cheering on the private market don't realize is that your tax dollars are paying for 90% of the sales of these auto-injectors. Schools and other public institutions are required by law to buy these auto-injectors to have on hand in the event someone has an allergic reaction. Much like sovaldi and the other recent record price drugs where 80%+ of the sales are to medicaid and government institutions (prisons) these drug prices are only possible because the government isn't allowed to negotia
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The active ingredient in Epipens is epenephrine, however, when a doctor writes you a prescription for an epipen, it is SPECIFICALLY for an epipen, you cannot get epenephrine syringes instead, you can't get another autoinjector instead, it's ONLY for epipens.
However, if a prescription for epinephrine is given out, you have some choice over delivery methods.
So, what happens if the doctor won't give out a standard epenephrine pres
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You would need to convince your doctor to write a prescription for epinephrine instead.
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It sure is, just not in the way you suggest.