Roy Exum
It is a good guess that for about 30 years I have kept an EpiPen on the top of my refrigerator. I have never had to open the box, much less jab a dose of life-saving epinephrine into a person suffering from anaphylaxis. Whether it is a bee sting, peanut butter, shellfish or other allergies, I watched somebody come within inches of dying in my early 20s and swore I would have one within reach from that moment on.
It is an auto-injector device – slam it down on some stricken person’s thigh and the result is absolutely miraculous.
I went into anaphylactic shock in the hospital once when a drug that was administered went haywire but they popped me with about a dollar’s worth of epinephrine and I watched the second half of a football game about 30 minutes later.
In the last couple of weeks we have learned the EpiPen people – now Mylan Pharmaceuticals -- have increased the price from less than $100 in 2007 to over $600 for the exact-same gadget today. Nothing has changed, mind you, but greed and the price – the entire nation is furious. From presidential candidates to parents with at-risk children, it is a clear definition of unbridled price gouging and all that is wrong in “me first” America.
Worse, the CEO of Mylan is Heather Bresch – the daughter of West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin. What a piece of work! In 2007 our girl Heather was awarded an MBA from the University of West Virginia but an audit determined she had just done 22 of the required 44 credit hours for a Master’s in Business. After about a week, the university announced the whole thing was a mere snafu because she had failed to pay a $50 fee. She gladly sent over 50 bucks.
A week after that R. Stephen Sears, the Dean of WVU's business school, sent a letter to WVU's admissions and records office retroactively granting Bresch an MBA. Six classes were added to her record with letter grades, and two classes with "Incomplete" grades were given letter grades. Never mind whose daddy was senator.
By the time it was over university president Michael Garrison stepped down in a tawdry scandal. The business school dean was excused. Heather’s MBA was boldly rescinded but by then Heather had gotten control of EpiPen for Mylan. From 2007 to 2016 the wholesale price for an EpiPen has jumped 460 percent, going from $56.64 to $317.82.
But here’s the part you’ll love. In 2007 Heather Bresch was paid $2.4 million. In 2015 she was paid $18.9 million – a 671 percent increase – because (wink! wink!) sales are good. You see, the only competition Mylan had was Sanofi’s Auvi-Q. But in October last year when it was discovered the Sanofi device had an inaccurate dose delivery, all Sanofi’s epinephrine devices were recalled.
There then is this for the sleuths among us: Mylan president Rajiv Malik’s salary is up 11 percent to $1 million and Chief Commercial Officer Anthony Mauro is now at $675,000, which only further points to Heather Bresch’s 671 percent increase. Yes, there are heated calls for her to resign in shame.
The bottom line? Is “Miss Monopoly” set or what? With Congress, the medical community and American business aghast at what Mylan has blatantly done, the CEO said yesterday Americans should redirect their anger to a “broken health system” instead of her company. “Nobody knows what anything costs anymore,” she responded with innocence. “Our health care is in crisis. This bubble is going to burst.”
In a crisis-control mode, Mylan said yesterday it would issue coupons worth $300 immediately to anyone who had to pay for the drug out-of-pocket but letters with over 100,000 signatures are flooding Congress. Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking over Heather’s daddy’s voice, said Mylan is “the latest troubling example of a (monopoly) taking advantage of its consumers.”
But that does nothing to help the parents and friends of those who must react immediately when anaphylaxis onset begins. And since I do not need the $1.00 worth of epinephrine personally, the only way I can renew my stash is to get a coupon and pay $300 for something I have never had to use.
I can only pray a law enforcement officer will have an EpiPen the next time I see a child start struggling to breathe. Anaphylaxis can kill a person, so help me it can.