The same WalMart owned by six of the richest people in America, who do everything in their power to screw over suppliers and employees alike? Now I know you’re pulling my leg.
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When I worked there they did. It was a yearly bonus based on store performance. They also had stock options. Actually there were quite a few people working in the early 70s and 80s who ended up making bank with stock splits.
So yeah, even though Walmart is terrible in other respects, my main point is lots of companies do do some type of profit sharing, including the awful walmart.
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One of my friends handed me his epipen just before he died… He must have really wanted me to have it.
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Well, she can still afford it, and isn’t that what really counts?
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I’m glad this free market makes people buy health insurance so that they can potentially afford this lifesaving drug device that’s been around for centuries and manufactured by only one company. Good thing this free market keeps consumers safe from the potentially unsafe competition. In fact, if they wanted to really optimize those profits, any competition should probably just trade their government licenses to optimize their life saving drug territory.
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While that is a very nice explanation, quite simply, take the widget away from the monsters and give it to children who are about to die.
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It’s not the medication, it’s the the injector. You can get a vial of epinephrine that you inject yourself with a traditional syringe for cheap, but then you have to inject yourself which may not be easy in the kind of situations where it’s needed.
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Sounds like something ripe for home 3D printing technology.
Even if you coldn’t sell injectors legally, for the price of one you could buy a printer that would make a lifetime supply…
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Now that the original inventor has been well compensated, these vultures should be competing with generics.
This system is disgusting!
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Worse yet the invention was funded by tax dollars.
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Oh, the sarcasm wasn’t obvious?
I’m from one of those socialist countries with socialized healthcare, so I get a good laugh when the free market eats it’s most fundamentalist children.
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Erm, No, it’s really not. These things are really precise, and easy to screw up. The autoinjector that was previously available as an alternative got recalled. Even on working EpiPens, there are all kinds of warnings about where precisely you have to place it, in order to not have the spring loaded needle strike your Femur, which would be a very unpleasent day (on top of, you know, being unable to breath due to anaphalactic shock).
I can’t imagine the sort of testing and tollerances required to produce such things, which are one use, mind you, so, no testing on the actual device, it’s one shot, and it MUST work.
None of that, btw, excuses the drug companies’ practices. This is EXACTLY the same autoinjector used in other applications, including for anti-nerve agents issued to military personnel in chemical combat zones (and yes, it VERY MUCH freaked me out when the exact same device, albiet loaded with different medication, was handed to me that I’d had to learn in Chem Warfare training when I was in the Air Force that I was now potentially going to need to use on my young children in an emergency). This is a known, established medical device, and, while it isn’t appropriate for home production, or even cheap, unreliable mass production, there’s no reason for it to be tied to the medication itself in terms of the prescription (any more than the specific syringe is to Insulin), nor for it suddenly quadruple or more in price years from it’s invention, rollout and being in common use (so, no “we’re paying for it’s design and development”).
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Well, if there isn’t a reversal because of outrage, then I guess we’ll find out. Maybe this can be a test case to see how well the free market keeps drug costs down. Care to make a wager?
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Well, there are ways to design things that depend on high accuracy and precision to work, and there are ways to design things that don’t depend on high accuracy to work.
An example from working with an electrical engineer years ago: he was designing a network to provide a bias voltage to each input of a differential amplifier, so he designed two separate resistor divider networks that required 0.01% tolerance parts to get both inputs to be close enough to have the output offset acceptable. The actual input bias voltage was very forgiving as long as they were the same, so I rearranged his four resistors into a single divider and fed each input through a resistor from that. I could use 10% tolerance parts and the output offset was still a tenth of what he was getting.
So, it might take some clever engineering, but I wouldn’t discount it as undoable (and 3D printing is getting better by leaps and bounds…)
I do agree, there is a whole lot of wrongness going on with this story, from the medication + dispensing method being tied to each other, to the design being funded by public money…
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You know, the EpiPen was designed with public funds by Sheldon Kaplan (NASA dude I believe). The DOD used it, and called it the ComboPen. Mylan bought the rights, in 2007 for the injector (the drug itself is only $1 worth), and since then been increasing the price each quarter. Greed to the max!!
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Is it possible to sue a company for overcharging? See I didn’t think so but a few years back BC Hydro or its subsidary Powerex sold a huge amount of hydro electricity to California when it had all sort of energy shortages and then later they got sued for overcharging. I don’t know if the case is over or still in the courts but it looked like they had to pay.
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Mylan (prudently) gave to the Clinton Foundation:
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/contributors?category=%24100%2C001%20to%20%24250%2C000&page=4
Edit - Apparently, it was less than $250,000. Not nearly enough!!
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No doubt, the proceeds will go towards patient-advocated reform of Big Pharma.
Meanwhile, there’s this:
Seems to have bi-partisan momentum right now. We’ll see how long that lasts after the election.
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From the outside perspective this seems like some sort of giant whack-a-mole. Instead of fixing the problem from the ground up (=patents, monopolies etc.) they only jump at every bogey-man/company that gets the media spotlight for being a bit too greedy.
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This pricing decision is already class motivated violence. You’re actually wondering when anyone will start fighting back.
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