Rising Epipen Prices

(Reuters) - Mylan NV said on Monday it would launch the first generic to its allergy auto-injector EpiPen at a discount of more than 50 percent to the branded product's list price.

The company reduced the out-of-pocket costs of EpiPen for some patients last week amid a wave of criticism from lawmakers and the public over the rapid escalation in the product's price in the past few years.

Mylan said it expected to launch the generic product "in several weeks" at a list price of $300. The branded product costs about $600. EpiPen cost about $100 in 2008.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mylan-la...ergy-injection-102334551--finance.html?ref=gs

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Bamaro said:

Seems weird that they would have a generic for their own product:conf2:

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Tide1986 said:

If you could get $300 for your device or $0 for your device, which would you choose?

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So let me try to make this easier to understand.

Imagine that the government creates the Furniture and Desk Association, an agency which declares that only IKEA is allowed to sell chairs. IKEA responds by charging $300 per chair. Other companies try to sell stools or sofas, but get bogged down for years in litigation over whether these technically count as “chairs”. When a few of them win their court cases, the FDA shoots them down anyway for vague reasons it refuses to share, or because they haven’t done studies showing that their chairs will not break, or because the studies that showed their chairs will not break didn’t include a high enough number of morbidly obese people so we can’t be sure they won’t break. Finally, Target spends tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and gets the okay to compete with IKEA, but people can only get Target chairs if they have a note signed by a professional interior designer saying that their room needs a “comfort-producing seating implement” and which absolutely definitely does not mention “chairs” anywhere, because otherwise a child who was used to sitting on IKEA chairs might sit down on a Target chair the wrong way, get confused, fall off, and break her head.

(You’re going to say this is an unfair comparison because drugs are potentially dangerous and chairs aren’t – but 50 people die each year from falling off chairsin Britain alone and as far as I know nobody has ever died from an EpiPen malfunction.)

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Mylan CEO Heather Bresch infuriated lawmakers as she tried — and mostly failed — to explain steep cost increases of her company's life-saving EpiPens.

Outraged Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday grilled Bresch about the emergency allergy shot's sky-high price and the profits for a company with sales in excess of $11 billion. The list price of EpiPens has grown to $608 for a two-pack, an increase of more than 500 percent since 2007.

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