Heather Bresch is the CEO of Mylan. She and her company have been in the news recently after she decided to crank the cost of the EpiPen. In her defense, she would prefer to continue to get her $18 million dollars and not be bothered by a moral conscience. The company’s investors may have to sacrifice her in order to stave off further investigations into their potentially dubious tax practices. You don’t head up a billion-dollar business without some access to media damage control—and Ms. Bresch wants to save that job and reputation of hers before she gets scapegoated by the hypocrites she works for. Enter the New York Times profile on her today entitled “Painted as EpiPen Villian, Mylan’s Chief Says She’s No Such Thing,” by Katie Thomas. The article begins with a quick runthrough of how Ms. Bresch is now being classed as a “villain” alongside other recent big pharma bad guys like Martin Shkreli and Michael Pearson who are both, in their own rights, terrible people. But, unlike Shkreli and Pearson, Bresch is firmly entrenched inside of the business world—she’s not some young arrogant turk!
Already, Ms. Bresch, 47, has moved more quickly than they did to quell public furor over prices. On Thursday, she announced that the company was increasing financial assistance to patients to reduce their out-of-pocket costs. But the company did not say it would lower the list price — which has risen to about $600 for a pack of two EpiPens, from about $100 when Mylan acquired the product in 2007.
In an interview, Ms. Bresch said the price increases on EpiPen weren’t even in the “same hemisphere” as what Mr. Shkreli did when he raised the price of Daraprim by 50 times overnight.
The “increasing financial assistance” was Mylan’s announcement that they wouldn’t really lower the price of the life-saving drug. It’s the old gangster move of punching you in the face and then saying if you pay me money I won’t punch you in the face anymore—I’ll just smack you in the face. She also used that announcement to try to blame her price-gouging on Obamacare. Classy. Bresch wants you to know that she’s a straight shooter.
“I think we mean what we say: You can do good and do well, and I think we strike that balance around the globe,” Ms. Bresch said. Still, she was unapologetic that Mylan’s actions were driven by profit. “I am running a business. I am a for-profit business. I am not hiding from that.”
One of the problems here is that after Gordon Gecko took control of our national consciousness a couple of decades ago, no one mentioned to Ms. Bresch (or Martin Shkreli for that matter) that when you have record income inequality—so much so that neo-fascism has a candidate heading a major political party—being open about your sociopathic greed is … gauche.
Ms. Bresch has also weathered her share of controversy, like when it was discovered that West Virginia University awarded her a business degree 10 years after she had attended the school, even though she had completed only about half of the coursework. A report by the university later concluded that officials wrongly awarded her the degree because she was the daughter of the then-governor Joe Manchin, now a Democratic senator representing West Virginia. Mr. Manchin and Ms. Bresch have said they did nothing wrong.
[...]
Some of the chafing at her style, she said, is because people are resistant to change. Her top accomplishments, she said, include getting a federal law passed that required more inspections of overseas drug manufacturers, and improving access to AIDS drugs for patients overseas. “To make change happen, to make a difference, mediocrity doesn’t get you there.”
Reading The Fountainhead too much these days, are we? Mediocrity doesn’t get you there? Gaaaarossssssssss. She sells generic drugs, she wants all markets open to her and she wants the playing field on overseas competition to be less lopsided. She’s exactly the same villain that they all are. Here’s a similar villain, played by Orson Welles, in the Carol Reed classic The Third Man.
Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.
—Harry Lime (Orson Wells) “The Third Man”