I mentioned a few days ago that Fox Butterfield had apparently taken up writing headlines. Fox Butterfield is the real name of a real, former New York Times reporter whose main claim to fame is comparing apples to apples and finding it incongruous. His most famous example was an article in which he wondered why felon-incarcerations were rising while the crime rate was falling.
Apparently it never occurred to him that locking up more career criminals for longer sentences might send the crime rate into decline. Nah, couldn't be.
Now we come to the latest crisis du jour, the explosion of the cost of EpiPens:
Doctors and patients say the Mylan pharmaceutical company has jacked up the prices for an EpiPen -- the portable device that can stop a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction -- from around $100 in 2008 to $500 and up today.Now, for patients who do need this medication, this price level is truly a serious matter and for some people no doubt is legitimately a crisis. That the medicine is delivered by auto-injector only illustrates the urgency with which the medicine is needed: it is not needed at all unless it is needed real bad.
That's a hike of over 400 percent.
"Patients are calling and saying they can't afford it," said Dr. Douglas McMahon, an allergy specialist in Maplewood, Minnesota. "They're between a rock and a hard place."
Mylan is the only company that makes Epipens. The only other maker ceased manufacture last year after a massive recall of its products. So Mylan enjoys an absolute monopoly, "a brand dominance equal to that of Kleenex."
As you can imagine, there are calls for the federal government to do something. So:
And there he is, folks: the Fox Butterfield Republican who doesn't understand why, oh why, this medical device is so expensive when, after all, the taxpayers are paying for it!
In response, Mylans wrote back that "product improvements" had made the cost rise but also that "most EpiPens are covered by insurance." Well, duh.
This is not to minimize that people who need these are still paying money out of pocket -- because there is nothing so heartless as the pay scale of Medicaid or Medicare, both of which are deliberately designed to rations health care to their patients.
It is to point out that Grassley and the rest of the Political Class remain clueless that government always skews the market. As EpiPen user Tom Knighton writes,
"When epinephrine only costs a few cents, but they're going up to $500, personally I don't think that's ethically responsible," said Dr. McMahon.
And he understands better than most what costs are involved: For the past few years he's been developing his own, smaller version of the EpiPen, and trying to get it approved by the FDA and bring it to market. He estimates that process costs about $1.5 million. In 2015, Mylan's profits from the sale of EpiPens rose to $1.2 billion.
McMahon says his device will retail for about $50. ...
Further, McMahon first needs to go $1.5 million in the hole -- in addition to his research and development costs -- to bring a product to market.And there you have it, Americans: when more government is what you vote for, more government is what you get. And when you think that government should pay for things, it will. Boy, will it ever:
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