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Comment by repiret | Hacker News Reader

Thats like saying pirated software exposes the greed of software companies. I don't think that anybody believes that EpiPens themselves are very expensive at all - just like software, the cost comes from the cost of development, which in this market consists mostly of regulatory compliance and approval. If it were easy to bring an epinephrin injector to market, Teva would have already done so and Sanofi wouldn't have had to recall theirs. If there were more auto injectors on the market, the prices would go down.

The outrageous price of EpiPens is not a result of corporate greed so much as a failure of the FDA and Congress - but mostly Congress, the FDA is their subordinate. They failed to promogulate rules that maintained a competitive market for epinephrin auto injectors.

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The CEO of Mylan is a Senators daughter, they lobbied to pass a law to make schools carry epipen when it passed they jacked the prices up, the CEO also gave herself an $18,000,000 raise immediately afterwards. That IS corporate greed, the very definition.

Schools aren't required to carry EpiPens, at least not in my home state. They have, however, recently been allowed to carry them.

In my state, schools are required to carry them. As too are ambulances and paramedic units, despite the latter carrying epi on board (at the least the latter of which has been trained to administer Epi by drawing up, and the state is now moving to train the former, too, in light of all this).

If the current price of the EpiPen isn't due to corporate greed, then why did the price used to be significantly lower?

It's what the traffic will bear.

The cost is in the patented injector, the drug itself is cheap. Others have tried to market similar injectors, which didn't work as well as the Epipen.

As cost slowly rose, insurance paid for it, and parents didn't notice it as it was hidden in rising insurance premiums. Then deductibles skyrocketed, and suddenly insurance wasn't covering it all; parents had to pay the balance, or all of it.

If you didn't have insurance, you already watched it go up as it happened.

Finally the cost was raised arbitrarily, to cover the company's coming losses as their patent on the delivery system will expire. This, I've read recently, is common: a spike in price before generics take over.

The traffic bears this price, because parents don't want their kids to die from accidental exposure to peanuts and other allergens.

The price was raised so the CEO could escape the rigors of just scraping by on $2.5M. The board wasn't going to give her a raise without a boost in profits. That's easy to accomplish when you control 90% of the market. That is the only reason. Not production costs. Not future losses.

I bet their cheaper "generic" packaged version will see limited production to force supply shortages and drive people back to the overpriced pens.

I'm missing something - why were the costs rising?

Because they could.

> As cost slowly rose

I think you have a very liberal definition of "slowly."

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/23/this-chart-shows-you-why-a-lo...

The recent and tremendous price hike of the Epipen contradicts this line of reasoning. I don't see anything pointing to regulatory or compliance costs being behind this.

The price went up because Mylan got a monopoly on epinephrin auto injectors, they have that monopoly because regulations prevent would be competitors from swiftly and/or economically bringing competing products to market.

Nobody has to buy an auto injector. Diabetics draw insulin from a vile and inject themselves all the time, those with severe allergies can keep viles and needles too. I buy EpiPens because I don't want to do that. And before Avi-Q was recalled, I bought those instead, even though my costs were twice as high, because I liked them better.

You can say that capitalism is the wrong way to produce drugs, in which case its Congress' fault for not instituting a different way. Or you can say this is a failure of the regulated drug market to produce a result in the public interest, in which case its Congress' fault for not regulating the market differently - thats what I believe. If you're arguing that this is a moral failure of the Mylan stockholders… well I think thats a hard position to take, and no matter what demonstrating that auto injectors aren't expensive to build doesn't really try to make that argument.

I must admit that my reply was narrow-focused on Mylan not being able to pin the costs on compliance. After a re-read of your original comment, I see exactly the point you're making. You're right. The reason Mylan jacked the price up isn't directly due to their costs of compliance, it's related to the industry's cost (that is, any potential competitor), and the competition that is stifled because of it.

Your point about handling the injections the old fashioned way is a good one as well. But it's worth noting that diabetics have tons of experience self-injecting using standard needles and vials. A typical Epipen user has probably never had to do so, and when the drug is urgently needed is a bad time to get started. So for these users it's not simply a matter of convenience.

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