EpiPen Maker Mylan Tied Executive Pay to Aggressive Profit Targets

Yet it is legal for someone to subsist only on Doritos. Why not regulate those too.

The point is that, iirc, Mylan has a government-granted monopoly on the EpiPen via a patent for the injection mechanism. That means Mylan is the only company that is legally allowed to manufacture it in the United States. In addition, it takes millions of dollars to bring a treatment through the slow FDA approval process (though it's not clear if this is necessary to compete with EpiPen), so even if someone was somehow able to circumvent and/or license any patents Mylan may hold, it'd still take herculean resources to bring a competitor to market.

That's what the grandparent is talking about. The EpiPen can be so expensive because no one else is legally allowed to sell a substantially similar device without Mylan's permission. When the consumer has only one option, especially for something as crucial as a life-saving medication, things are really bad, whether the economic system that consumer is living under calls itself "capitalism" or something else.

We've got to fix our intellectual property laws, both patent and copyright. A large part of the Fortune 500 is only there because of the excessive legal monopolies that we've granted through intellectual property (which means it'll be basically impossible to fix).

There are also companies making generics for Adrenaclick, they cost ~$140.

Yes there are various degrees of purity in capitalism across the world and one of the interestingly consistent things across history is that prosperity follows relative economic freedom, even if there is no purely free economy.

But for all its tradeoffs, patent protection does create an incentive for massive investment in R&D. It's difficult to imagine a meaningful counterfactual scenario.

Of course, bad patent office execution (leading to patent trolling, etc.) is parasitic and harms the system as a whole.

But what about the FDA? The FDA is notoriously overly risk-averse when it comes to approving new treatments. It simply should not be hard to get a competing delivery mechanism approved. It's easy to test, the test of whether the mechanism works can be repeated at nearly zero cost thousands of times, offering substantially more data than the typical drug approval process yields (when the question is whether a drug is safe long term).

If you are an FDA regulator, the only way you can really lose your job and pension is by approving a drug that should not have been approved. Nobody is keeping score of the suffering and loss of life caused by sluggish approvals.

- Our system has many biases toward over-centralization, and the idea that we should have one Federal entity completely in charge of drug approvals is pretty absurd. Why not encourage many other groups to make recommendations. Why can't the FDA have its own list, as well as a list made by the AMA, major HMOs etc. Why not also consider the list used in the UK, etc.

When we a) combine effectiveness research with b) a public health mandate and c) risk-averse career burocrats, we end up with our current system. If our government weren't in the business of coordinating regulatory capture games, it would simply relinquish control of absolute authority, and allow respected third party institutions to have a voice.

If your doctor prescribes drug x simply because it's FDA approved, that is very much the wrong decision. The side-effect for Vioxx that led to it being pulled was well known to doctors (and applies to all NSAIDs), and so any doctor who let a patent suffer with Vioxx was at somewhat clueless if not negligent.

So yes, the government is yet another corrupt firm with a monopoly on certain things that it abuses for profit, harming all of us in the process.

> This is the real capitalism

Our economy contains some areas that are heavily corrupt and not very competitive, and others that are under the radar and are highly competitive.

I've seen multiple people try to figure out why there is no competition, and some consensus around the fact that while the drug is not patented, the particular delivery device design (or combination of it and the drug) is patented, and due to issues of needing to train people on multiple different delivery devices, there's no room to break into the market with an equivalent that evades the patent concern.