Thinking about Mylan, the company that recently jacked up the price of the epipen past it's already absurdly high price point(Mylan didn't create the epipen, they bought it in 2007 after it had already received FDA approval meaning Mylan didn't have to pay for the costs of development or the approval process). People like to chime in that the government is responsible for limiting competition, as if that somehow makes it okay and understandable for Mylan to have jacked up the price the way they did. So that makes me want to ask this: Does the ability to do something lessen the gravity and responsibility of what you actually do? For example, we can all drive cars around on the road. We have access to them, and we can use them. Does that then lessen the gravity of a situation where I use my car to hurt people or commit a crime? Can I point to the government and say "Well, if they hadn't let me have the ability to do this, I wouldn't have been able to do it" and expect that to gloss over the fact that I still chose to do it? Does my choosing, willingly, voluntarily, to do something mean less because I was allowed access to a car? What if it's a building, and I walk in a take a big crap in the lobby. Does my responsibility for that lessen because the building allowed me inside? My point is, Mylan jacked up the price here because they could. Does that lessen the gravity of that situation? Does responsibility for your actions(yes even when you're a corporation because hey, corporations are people too now!) lessen depending upon if someone made it possible for you to do something? This is a concept I see applied all the time when it comes to business. Businesses are somehow less responsible for their practices and actions because they are a business and they want to make money, because they have a responsibility to their shareholders, etc. Greed, even when it's to the point of disrupting things, is condoned and excused. And I'm just sitting here wondering how any of that makes a company like Mylan less responsible for price gouging people who need medicine because the real bad guy here, so we're told, is the evil government for limiting competition.
Gates got rich off Microsoft, Jobs got rich off of Apple. Is it so much to ask that the people who believed in and invested in Mylan get their fortunes too? Plus I thought Obamacare was going to pay for everyone's medical care anyway.
"Does the ability to do something lessen the gravity and responsibility of what you actually do?" JMO: No, not at all. I've seen people make the points that government interference is solely responsible for bad business practices. Even in a crony business-government situation/relationship some people will absolve the business while they blame only the government. The government "blocking competition" is no justifiable reason whatsoever for businesses to jack up prices sky high. From my pov, in addition to keeping unsafe products out of public reach, the government is responsible for price capping since apparently many in the market refuses to restrain themselves from robbing their own customers. It is only in the regard that government doesnt price fix that they are to blame for price gouging. The actual practice of gouging falls squarely on the business.
Health care will never be a truly free market, even if the government left it alone. People who don't agree with the price or services of say, McDonald's, can just take their business to burger king. If you have life threatening allergies, you NEED an epipen. Sure, you could just get prefilled epinephrine syringes but the time you waste trying to inject yourself could kill you. I have depression. I take zoloft. I have to take zoloft because no other antidepressant has worked for me. Thankfully, zoloft is cheap. But if someone decided to rig the system, I'd be screwed. No generic has come out for the epipen because nobody has managed to create a comparable delivery system. If the fda wasn't regulating (*)(*)(*)(*), we could get bad drugs. Do you want an epipen that doesn't work right on the market? There is absolutely nothing wrong with turning a profit, but this goes beyond that. If someone tells me they want to sell me a coffee maker for $10,000, I can laugh at them and head to the dollar store and pick on up for $20. Medicine doesn't work that way outside of calling around to find cheaper primary care docs for routine services. If you have a heart attack you either go to the nearest hospital using the only ambulance service that serves your area or you die. Sent from my SM-G360T1 using Tapatalk
Neither Windows or OS can keep your child from dying. Neither Jobs or Gates simply "Bought" computers and then jacked up the price. GREED should not be excused or celebrated for ANY reason unless you want to be judged as being an a$$hole.
I bet your definition of greed is other people getting rich because they work harder than you. Edit: Added an 'h' in the word 'than'.
That is a bet you would badly lose. You however seem to meet the definition set forth quite handily....Greed is the desire for money and power above the impacts it have on others. YOU obviously like the idea and have been judged accordingly.
Fortunately new drug creators still have a few legal rights left until they have to go out of business because of federal regulations.
One would hope your intellectual limitations do not prevent you from looking up where this "Drug" was developed. "The first modern epinephrine autoinjector, the EpiPen, was invented in the mid-1970s at Survival Technology in Bethesda, Maryland by Sheldon Kaplan[8][9] and was first approved for marketing by the FDA in 1987.[10] In 1996, Survival Technology merged with a company called Brunswick Biomedical and the new company was called Meridian Medical Technologies Inc..[11] In 1997, Dey, a subsidiary of Merck KGaA, acquired the exclusive right to market and distribute the EpiPen.[12][13] In 1998 there was a recall of one million EpiPens, the second such recall in a year.[14] In 2001 Meridian and Dey introduced a two-pack version of the EpiPen; at that time the device had $23.9 million in annual sales and accounted for 75% of the market in the United States.[15] In 2002 King Pharmaceuticals acquired Meridian for $247.8 million in cash;[16] the deal was completed in January 2003.[17] (King was later acquired by Pfizer in 2010 for $3.6 billion in cash.[18]) Kaplan continued to improve his designs over the years, filing for example US Patent 6,767,336 in 2003.[19] In 2003, Hollister-Stier received approval from the FDA to market an epinephrine autoinjector called Twinject that could deliver two shots of epinephrine, which it had spent ten years developing.[20][21][22] In 2005, it sold the product to Verus Pharmaceuticals,[20] which launched the product the same year.[23] In March 2008, Sciele Pharma acquired Twinject from Verus[24] and later that year, Sciele was acquired by Shionogi.[25] In 2007, Mylan acquired the right to market the EpiPen from Merck KGaA as part of a larger transaction.[26] At that time annual sales were around $200 million[27] and the EpiPen had about 90% of the market.[28] In 2009, Teva Pharmaceuticals filed an ANDA to market a generic EpiPen in collaboration with Antares Pharma Inc, a maker of injection systems; Pfizer and King sued them for infringing US Patent 7,449,012 that was due to expire in 2025;[29] Pfizer, Mylan, and Teva settled in April 2012 in a deal that allowed Teva to start selling the device in mid-2015, pending FDA approval.[30] In 2009, Intelliject, a US startup developing a new epinephrine autoinjector, licensed their product to Sanofi.[31] In 2010, Sciele/Shionogi faced a recall of Twinject devices[32] and launched Adrenaclick, a modified version of the Twinject that could deliver only one dose.[33][34] In 2010, European regulators approved Twinject,[35] and also approved a new epinephrine autoinjector made by ALK and sold under the brand name Jext.[36][37] Jext was launched in the European Union in September 2011.[38] Also in 2010, Shionogi authorized Greenstone, the authorized generics division of Pfizer,[39][40]to begin selling an authorized generic of Adrenaclick.[41][42] The media noted that Pfizer, through Greenstone, was marketing a generic epinephrine autoinjector when Pfizer acquired King later that year.[43] At that time, King and Mylan's EpiPen had 91% of the global market share for epinephrine autoinjectors and 96% of the US market.[43] In 2010, Pfizer and King sued Novartis' Sandoz generic unit for patent infringement after Sandoz submitted an ANDA to sell a generic EpiPen.[44] In response, Sandoz challenged the validity of the patents, and as of July 2016 this litigation was ongoing.[45] In 2011, Pfizer and King sued Intelliject and Sanofi after the companies filed a 505(b)(2)[46] New Drug Application for the product, then known as "e-cue";[47] Pfizer, Mylan and Sanofi settled in 2012 under a deal that allowed the device to enter the market no earlier than November 2012, pending FDA approval.[48] In August 2012, the FDA approved the autoinjector, called "Auvi-Q" after the FDA required a name change from "e-cue".[49] The device is equipped with a sound chip to provide electronic voice instructions to guide the user in the proper use of the device.[50][51] In 2012, Mylan launched a program called EpiPen4Schools to sell EpiPens in bulk and with discounts to schools; to participate in the program schools had to agree not to buy epinephrine autoinjectors from any other company for a year.[52] In 2012, Shionogi, the manufacturer of Adrenaclick and Twinject, announced it would stop making them;[31] it had sold the rights to the NDA to a company called Amedra Pharmaceuticals.[53][54] In June 2013, Amedra relaunched Adrenaclick.[55] and at the same time, Lineage Therapeutics launched its authorized generic version of Adrenaclick.[56] Lineage was a wholly owned subsidiary of Amedra that had acquired the rights to the Adrenaclick authorized generic from Greenstone/Pfizer.[57] After successful lobbying from Mylan,[27] in 2013, the "School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act" became law after passing Congress with broad and bipartisan support; it protected anyone from liability if they administered epinephrine to a child in a school (previously, only trained professionals or the affected person were allowed to administer the drug, and were open to liability), and it provided some financial incentives for schools that didn’t already stock epinephrine autoinjector to start stocking them.[58] In January 2015 Mylan filed a citizen petition with the FDA raising concerns about TEVA's ANDA application to market a generic EpiPen and filed an additional supplement later in May; the FDA rejected the petition in June.[59][60] In March 2015, Impax Laboratories acquired the parent company of Amedra and Lineage, and placed Amedra and the Adrenaclick in its Impax Specialty Pharma division; at the same time it acquired Lineage, which it placed, along with its generic version of Adrenaclick, in its Impax Generics division.[61][62] In October 2015, Auvi-Q devices were voluntarily recalled by Sanofi in North America.[63][64] The reason stated by Sanofi was that the products had been found to potentially have inaccurate dosage delivery, which may include failure to deliver drug.[65] In February 2016, Sanofi terminated its license to manufacture and market the Auvi-Q, leaving Kaléo (Intelliject was renamed) to consider how and whether to re-introduce the device.[66][67] The EpiPen had 89% of the market for epinephrine autoinjectors in 2015;[52] in the first half of the year it had about 85% share and Auvi-Q had about 10% share.[27] In March 2016, Teva's ANDA for a generic EpiPen, which had already faced several delays, was rejected by the FDA.[68] In 2015 Mylan had about had about $1.5B in sales of EpiPens and those sales accounted for 40% of Mylan's profit.[27] Mylan had maintained about a 90% market share since it had acquired the product, and had continually raised the price of EpiPens starting in 2009: in 2009, the wholesale price of two EpiPens was about $100; by July 2013, the price was about $265; in May 2015, it was around $461; and in May 2016, the price rose again to around $609,[26] around a 500% jump from the price in 2009.[69] In the summer of 2016, as parents prepared to send their children back to school and went to pharmacies to get new EpiPens, people began to express outrage at the cost of the EpiPen and Mylan was widely and harshly criticized.[70][71] In September 2016, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began an investigation into Mylan's EpiPen4Schools program in New York to determine if the program's contracts violated antitrust law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinephrine_autoinjector I suppose this should not be a surprise considering your projected mental abilities.
We're switching to the different brand, once our current pens expire. EPiPen is like Klenex. Its the name. Mylan are disgraceful. There is no logical reason for the price gouging besides greed. Less than $100 9 or so years ago. Its disgraceful. This isn't an Iphone or TV.
Wow just occurred to me with your natural empathy and my entrepreneurial spirit we could sell this epipen thing worldwide making ourselves and Mylan mega rich at the same time. Let me know what you think.
Well....considering the fact MY opinions and motivations cannot effect world affairs or corporate decision it is clear your attempts at humorous sarcasm should simply be dismissed as the attempt to dodge ridicule and negative judgment they very clearly are. That said...the idea is sound regardless of your intent. However....there are far more pressing medical issues in the world than bee stings and peanut allergies. I say we leave the humanitarian activities to people far more capable and empathic than you and I....maybe to that Gates fellow you tried to use earlier.
