If this title seems extreme, it is meant to be that way. While I personally believe in capitalistic solutions, I also believe in using every legal means necessary to dissuade future sociopathic profiteers from indulging in what they do. I have no personal agenda here as I have no allergies.
Mere public shaming won’t be enough because people like Heather Bresch are incapable of being shamed. They just don’t give a damn about what anyone thinks. But her dad, Joe Manchin, might be susceptible to public shaming given his position in the Senate. And if dad is getting uncomfortable with the heat, he MAY be able to influence his daughter , a tad. Though given her recent promotion and current financial bonanza, she may not feel the need to depend on her dad anymore and may be beyond such indirect pressure.
While marches and other protests are a good starting point, they achieve little in isolation. We need to have an infrastructure that can go and attack these sociopaths in a non violent way. Put pressure on the administration to go after this family and find every little mistake they made and make them pay for it even if we can’t legally punish Heather for this Epipen price increase.
Epipen right now has no competition in the device market. Short term, we can’t expect another company to come up with a device that can take advantage of the market. Epipen may just reduce the price short term to dissuade such competition and jack it up again later. Though such a move could get them into trouble for monopolistic pricing.
Heather is no genius(she got her job through her dad’s connections and she was involved in a fake degree controversy in West Virginia). However, she is smart enough to recognize an opportunity, diligent enough to take advantage of her political family background to master all the regulatory issues and focused enough to build the groundwork for such a move to increase prices and lacks the moral compass to not be shamed by what she goes . She is not even a great CEO when it comes to shareholders. When it comes to mergers, acquisitions, what she can get out of such moves takes precedence over what is best for her shareholders.
Heather Bresch blames Obamacare for the controversy!!!
Yep, this lady comes up with some convoluted logic. See, people didn’t know the price of their Epipens in the past. But now, with high deductible plans becoming more prevalent, they know the real price. AS if insurance companies wouldn’t have passed on the cost in plans which do not have high deductibles. She is mad that the price increase is more transparent now .
She is very calculating too. She identified Epipen as her road to super riches for a while. She laid the groundwork to Epipen being made indispensable by lobbying for it to be carried in more schools, and other public agencies.
Bresch, who at the time was overseeing the Merck integration as president of Mylan (she became CEO in 2012), saw EpiPen as a hidden gem. She poured marketing resources into the product, and embarked on an awareness and political campaign to get more EpiPens into schools and other public institutions. Today, 47 states have laws about making epinephrine auto-injectors available at school in case of an anaphylaxis incident, largely as a result of Bresch’s efforts. Mylan signed on famous spokespeople for EpiPen, including actress Sarah Jessica Parker and celebrity chef Amanda Freitag.
And EpiPen is a huge point of pride for Mylan as well as for Bresch herself. Inside Mylan, executives including Bresch all refer to EpiPen as her “baby”: It’s Mylan’s first billion-dollar drug, reaching $1 billion in annual sales in 2014 and 2015
Initially , the price increases were not as obscene. But once, she felt comfortable, like a drug dealer who got their clients hooked on cheap samples, she jacked up the price. Read this Fortune article:
..has been actively trying to renegotiate contracts with pharmacies and distributors this year that kept the EpiPen competitively priced with is biggest competitor, Sanofi’s Auvi-Q. But now that the Sanofi SNYNF -0.83% drug is no longer on the market—the company recalled its entire supply last fall, and has since abandoned it—Mylan is looking to ditch contracts that constrained EpiPen’s price. “I think you’ll see opportunities for us to continue to have that price per pen increase,” CEO Bresch said at a conference in May.
You can read all about her , her achievements for her company and her moves that put herself above the shareholders at in this Fortune article.
Institutional investors have long accused Coury and Bresch of putting their interests ahead of those of shareholders—a suspicion that Mylan’s rebuff of Teva only deepened. “They’re kind of in the penalty box,” says Marty Sass, a money manager of $7.5 billion who sold half his Mylan stake in July. “Everybody hates them.”
Under Bresch’s leadership, Mylan has also stumbled through a series of ethically messy mishaps and public relations gaffes. Mylan’s inversion took place just as uproar over the tactic reached a fever pitch on Capitol Hill. (Among the politicians who denounced the move was Bresch’s own father, though he later changed his mind.) Critics have called out the company for unusually high executive pay packages, questionable use of company jets, and murky relationships with board members. Then there’s “the Heather Bresch situation,” as she herself calls it, a scandal surrounding her executive MBA credentials
The article also shows a side of her that is formidable and she seems less flaky than a guy like Martin Shkreli(contrary to initial belief, this jackassactually has come out in support of the EpiPen price increase). She has good command over the regulatory frameworks governing the pharma industry.
In conclusion, this is my wish list:
1. Is there another Democrat(not necessarily liberal but good enough to win the general) who can unseat Manchin or make him sweat out the next time he is primaried? Or at least, make life tougher for him?
2. Are there “underground” liberal groups that follow the wikileaks example and make life miserable for Mylan by exposing any secrets they have making this whole issue a bigger headache than they anticipated as it has an adverse affect on the rest of their product lines?
3. Can legit activist groups compile an easy to reference list of alternatives to Mylan’s other products?
4. Can we have rewards for whistleblowers to report on anything slightly shady Heather Bersch or any other Mylan execs get involved in? Will the corporation and its shareholders welcome such scrutiny and think that the greedy move to raise EpiPen prices wasn’t worth it?
5. To her credit, HIllary did bash the price increase. But Mylan has been big donors to the Clinton Foundation. They promised the Foundation to deliver four anti HIV drugs at a cheap cost. Have they delivered on that promise? The Clinton Foundation can help shed light on Mylan’s promises.
6. Find it odd that Sanofi couldn’t figure out how to tweak their device to make it more foolproof. According to this article, their product may not have been as faulty as we think it may have been. AuviQ was a voluntary recall. From a blog , One Spot Allergy, that reported on this:
There were only 26 adverse incident reports, of which 9 were Canada based, none of them has been confirmed, and none of them reported any adverse effects on the patient. I learned that unconfirmed means that the device was not returned to Sanofi for investigation or that in returned ones the device malfuction could not be seen and/or that medical reports had not been reviewed.
And here is a startling comparison to EpiPen:
Specifically, to gain perspective on this matter, I looked at EpiPen failure statistics/malfunction reports. During the two years that Allerject has been on the market, there have been 34 adverse reaction reports regarding the EpiPen in Canada. That same database shows 10 reports during that period regarding Allerject. While many more EpiPens than Allerjects have been distributed in Canada, I hope you see what I mean when I say that switching back to EpiPen is like jumping from the frying pan to the fire: EpiPen had three times the number of failure reports during the same period.
You may not be surprised to learn that in my humble opinion, 99.99% of the risk of inaccurate epinephrine dosage is user failure. For example, patients are using a Junior 0.15 dose of epinephrine when their children weigh enough for a regular dose.
Read More