The EpiPen plot thickens

I posted earlier about the controversy that a vital anti-allergy medicine in auto-injector EpiPens has risen to about $500 per pen.

Republican Senator Charles Grassley has called for an investigation. Yet health care affordability has been a tentpole Democrat issue since the 2008 campaign. Why, since it took years for the price to rise that high, have the Democrats been silent on this?

Well, well: "CEO at center of EpiPen price hike controversy is Sen. Joe Manchin’s daughter."

The West Virginia Democrat’s daughter, Heather Bresch, is chief executive of the company, which appears to have hiked the price of the epinephrine auto-injector by 400 percent since 2007. The device, which is used to treat severe allergic reactions, now costs more than $600 per dose. ...

Mylan employees and the company’s PAC contributed a total of $60,750 to Manchin between 2011 and 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This is crony capitalism business as usual. The Obama administration turns a blind eye to the price gouging because of the party connection and because it basically is a fund-raising operation for a Democrat senator: High prices garners funds for Mylan to roll back into the Democrat purse. You know, like federal unions' mandatory membership requirements and what happens to those mandatory dues.

“Right now we don’t have any comment,” Manchin spokesman Jon Kott said in an email Tuesday.

Of course not. They don't need to. The flurry of media coverage will now cease.

Update: The White House runs away (of course).

The White House's top spokesman refused on Wednesday to condemn the company or its top executive, whose father is a Democratic senator, for dramatically increasing the price of EpiPens.

"As it relates to this specific issue, you know, obviously I'm not going to make specific comment or specifically second-guess the pricing strategy or the business practices of one private enterprise," Josh Earnest, President Obama's press secretary, said on Wednesday.

He was reacting to reports that Mylan N.V. had boosted the price of the life-saving allergy shot 400 percent, to roughly $500 per dose. Earnest and other officials have had more violent reactions to similar price spikes in the healthcare industry that have often been blamed on corporate greed.

Earnest also had no comment on the fact that Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

Update 2: It's a Potemkin village all the way through, "The story of a cover-up
An inside look at how far WVU officials were willing to go for the governor's daughter and her unearned M.B.A." This daughter is the COO of Mylan.

Investigators unanimously concluded the decision to award the degree last fall, nearly a decade after Ms. Bresch left the program, was rife with favoritism.

The findings triggered the resignations of Provost Gerald Lang and business school dean R. Stephen Sears from their administrative posts, and launched widespread calls for the ouster of President Michael Garrison, a long-time family friend and former business associate of Ms. Bresch, whose boss, Mylan Chairman Milan Puskar, is WVU's biggest benefactor.