How Parents Harnessed the Power of Social Media to Challenge EpiPen Prices

And instead of insurance companies, it appears Social Media mobs are being effective at collective bargaining, which in other countries outside of the US has shown to be effective at keeping prices lower. Unfortunately it's a very selective outrage.

What Mylan is trying to do is a bit sneaky -- mollifying the high deductible complainers by giving them a coupon they can use but I believe in the long run it will backfire since it will drive more people to high deductible plans.

low deductible health insurance plans dont make much sense b/c no one has an incentive to save money. by having people share in more of the costs (up to a certain level) I think you get market forces to help keep prices in check

There are competitors to the Epipen but they don't get prescribed as much. I would surmise that has something to do with marketing budgets. Maybe we should join the rest of the world and ban drug advertisements? Oh, and allow Medicare to negotiate a bulk rate for drugs rather than pay MSRP[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D#Criticisms

The laws of supply and demand get regularly rediscovered <g>. A discouragingly large amount of government policy ignores supply&demand.

The Internet's attention span is 45 seconds on a good day, and that's not enough time to affect real change. Until this changes companies realize that all they have to do is weather the (brief) shitstorm until people move on to the next buzzworthy thing and then they can just go back to business as usual.

How many people know that the drug Martin Shkreli jacked the price on is still that same price long after he left the company? They never even did a show of putting it back briefly, the price was jacked up, Martin took the hate off the drug company that did it, and they kept collecting the money.

I don't think social media can affect real societal change because it's like trying to get an unmedicated ADD kid to do his homework, you can't hold his attention long enough to make meaningful progress.

That was one of purposes of high deductible plans -- to expose people to the prices.

In an ideal situation they would go search for more reasonable alternatives so create a market, but other, unintended perhaps consequence is it creates an outrage. So far, though, it is more of an impotent outrage. The stock went down from $50 to $45. That's not huge, it will recover soon.

The results of such an outrage is often the opposite -- other companies see and say "Ah, well, everyone else doing it without repercussions, we should raise our prices by 200% as well".

This is terrible.

What people don't seem to understand is - healthcare products are no laughing matter (literally). This isn't like software, where you can release early, release often, and where alpha quality is tolerated (to a degree).

For whatever reason, Mylan have done the FDA testing, and perfected a product that works reliably. That is expensive. (I suspect profit factored into it somewhere).

There's nothing stopping somebody for designing a different device (like Sanofi) did that does the same job - the devil is in the detail, and making sure you don't f_ck up.

Because believe me - the moment you screw up, and deliver the wrong dosage to some kid in anaphylatic shock, and he/she dies...your company is history (or facing a very costly recall and/or potential lawsuit).

My daughter recently had a health-scare. That moment, when I looked at her, and honestly thought she wasn't going to make it, was heart-wrenching. So I can tell you, as a parent, if my daughter was allergic to something, and the Epipen was $600, and I needed one around - sure, I'd be bummed about the money, but no, I wouldn't not pay it. And if you told me, these are the only guys so far who have made sure it's reliable, or you can get these cheap 3D printed copy that might work 85% of the time, or she might die but it's only $100 and realy, what's 15%?? What do you think I'm going to go for?

If this was like, say, something else that wasn't literally life-saving, then sure, people's risk appetites would probably change dramatically.

One of the biggest reasons is that it's not patent protected. Once a few generic versions hit the market, every manufacturer tries to grab market share by dropping the price. The price of a branded drug usually drops by 80-90% once the generic becomes available.

It looks like an attractive market right now, but once a few generics get launched, it won't be as attractive. Mylan is only making hand over fist because others failed to launch their copies.

I genuinely have no idea why people consider there to be no viable alternative to the EpiPen - the only guesses I might have are that the third autoinjector (Auvi-Q) being pulled off the market being more "newsworthy", that insurances don't cover it (but $140 is a pre-insurance cash price!), and third but probably most important: people aren't getting prescriptions for something they're not used to using. I have never gotten a prescription for anything but "EpiPen" specifically.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/upshot/the-epipen-a-case-s...

This year's election seems like a perfect time to re-think unflinching support for the two main parties in the US.

This is one of the challenges with drug pricing. If you're pricing your drug to the benefit it offers (which is what is generally done), you better do it at launch or you're screwed.

This has actually happened with other drugs in the past. The drug company runs a clinical trial in one disease, gets good data and sets a price. The drug then gets approved in another indication where the value is much higher, so they try and raise the price to reflect the added value. Usually it results in outrage.

Of course, we want strong requirements on life saving devices. Just a bummer it takes such an awfully long time.

Anyone know the longest pole schedule item in getting a new drug/treatment to market?