Unfortunately, that
assumption does not appear to be supported by the observable evidence.
According to Times columnist Charles
Duhigg, the company is still charging $609 for two name-brand EpiPens, or about
$370 for the generic versions. The company insists that it isn’t doing anything
wrong, and when challenged on this its CEO pointed out the on-line coupon and
discount programs that can bring the consumer’s cost down below $100 per
package. All of this appears to be correct, or at least Mr. Duhigg was able to
confirm it when he looked up the offers in question. The real question seems to
be why this situation is still going on a year after it made national
headlines? Did the company restore its prices to the infuriating levels once
the public outrage died down? Actually, it’s worse than that…
According to the linked
article, the company has never actually lowered the prices on this product,
although they have released the generic version and started up the discount and
coupon programs over the past year. It’s probably also worth pointing out that
despite the preposterous television commercial Mylan ran last year – it’s probably
what drew enough attention to push the whole situation into the public
consciousness in the first place – the EpiPen was never intended as anything
other than an emergency measure to stop a life-threatening allergic reaction
after everything else fails. Unless the user is extremely careless – or exceptionally
unlucky – the only time they should need to buy a new EpiPen is when their
current ones expire. But even considering that this isn’t a purchase anyone
should have to make more than once every few years, there’s still the question
of why the company hasn’t taken any real effort to lower the price. It turns
out that this is also worse than you’d expect…
Put simply, all the company
did was issue some ass-covering public relations measures and wait for the
outrage to blow over – because that’s all it needed to do. In today’s Internet
culture most people will have moved on to another scandal within a few days –
which is as much a comment on the number of horrific news stories that come up
these days as it is about the attention span of most people with access to
multiple media. In such cases it usually helps if the outrage spreads to the
shareholders of the company, or at least to the employees, but in this case
both groups DID complain to senior management, only to be brushed off as part
of the same stalling tactics. It’s unclear how much longer senior management
and the Board of Directors a Mylan might have continued with these tactics if
Federal regulators hadn’t announced that they were investigating the company
for overcharging Medicaid by $1.27 billion for the aforementioned EpiPens…
Now it would appear that a
group of pension fund managers, who control large blocks of Mylan stock, are
planning to unseat most of the Mylan board for what their press release called “new
lows in corporate stewardship.” The Times
story also notes that Mylan’s chairman was paid $97 million in 2016, which was
more than the salaries of the chief executives at Disney, GE and Wal-Mart
combined. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d certainly be demanding my
money back if I was one of the stockholders. And I hope somebody does, because
while this may be a new low in terms of ethics and decency, unless the people
who actually own these corporations (generally the stockholders) and the
governments that give them money (that’s your government, folks) don’t start
paying attention, and demanding better management practices, I’m reasonably
sure that there will be something even worse coming along any time now…
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