EpiPen price raises ire
400% surge for lifesaving device stirs call for inquiry.
Members of Congress are in an unusual position as they demand an explanation for Mylan NV’s 400 percent price increase for the EpiPen and focus attention squarely on Chief Executive Officer Heather Bresch.
EpiPens are medical devices designed to deliver adrenaline to a patient suffering from a potentially fatal allergic reaction. Allergy sufferers often have to carry more than one because they always need to be close by in case of an emergency. If lawmakers follow the usual script, Bresch could get called up to Capitol Hill next month to explain her company’s justification for raising the price on the lifesaving allergy shot. But that could be awkward, since she’s the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D- W.Va.
Lawmakers are already asking the company about taxpayers having to foot the bill for the price increases — particularly after Bresch and the company successfully pushed legislation to encourage use of the EpiPen in schools nationwide.
“Right now we don’t have any comment,” Manchin spokesman Jon Kott said in an email Tuesday.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, on Monday sent a letter to Bresch requesting information about how Mylan determined the price of EpiPens and whether the company provides assistance to patients to help with the cost.
Grassley said he has heard concerns about the high cost of EpiPens from many constituents, including a man in Iowa who recently had to pay more than $500 to refill his daughter’s EpiPen prescription. The letter asks the company to respond by Sept. 6. Congress is out of session until after Labor Day.
Separately, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is calling on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the price increases immediately.
“There does not appear to be any justification for the continual price increases of EpiPen,” Klobuchar wrote to FTC Chairman Edith Ramirez. “Manufacturing costs for the product have been stable and Mylan does not need to recover the product’s research and development costs because the product was on the market years before Mylan acquired it in 2007.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., sent Bresch a similar letter seeking an explanation for the price increase.
“I am deeply concerned
about this significant price increase for a product that has been on the market for more than three decades, and by Mylan’s failure to publicly explain the recent cost increase,” Warner wrote.
Mylan is the latest drugmaker to provoke congressional ire for steep price increases. Martin Shkreli and executives from the company he used to lead, Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, and executives from Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. were called before congressional committees earlier this year to explain why they bought the rights to older drugs that lacked competition
and raised the prices.
In a statement released Monday, Mylan did not directly address pricing strategy but said it is proud of the programs it has implemented to support access to epinephrine, including a patient assistance program and a program that provides free EpiPens to U.S. schools.
Mylan employees and the company’s political action committee contributed a total of $60,750 to Manchin between 2011 and 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
This isn’t the first time a business decision by Mylan has proved awkward for Manchin.
In 2014, through a deal with Abbott Laboratories, the company incorporated in the Netherlands — a move that let it lower its tax bill through what is known as an inversion.
The practice of U.S. companies moving their headquarters abroad to lower their taxes has popped up as a political issue in recent years. The Obama administration has advanced rules intended to curtail the practice, but Congress has not acted on the matter.
President Barack Obama has called inversions an “unpatriotic tax loophole.”
In a July 2014 interview
with National Journal, Manchin was asked whether the type of tax move engineered by his daughter was the right thing to do for companies.
Manchin didn’t directly answer the question but said he would support a law ending the practice.
“I think basically inversion should be absolutely repealed,” he told National Journal.