Spurious justification

“I am running a business.” So said the CEO of the price-gouging pharmaceutical company Mylan, maker of the EpiPen. Of course. Running an organization apparently provides justification for any form of barbarism. One can imagine the commandant of Auschwitz, testifying in the witness box, “I had a concentration camp to run.” Granted, the commandant of Auschwitz was somewhat more proactive about murdering people than our hapless CEO. She’s merely extorting $609 a pack from people who could die without a timely injection of a dollar’s worth of epinephrine during a severe allergy attack. So maybe she’s only a 5 or 6 on the 10-point Auschwitz scale.

Over the last seven years, Mylan jacked up the price of its EpiPen from $124 to $609. Most drug companies have been systematically jacking up prices on existing drugs for years. This is brazen monopoly capitalism, and worse yet, it’s subsidized by the government. George Bush’s Medicare drug plan, for example, bars Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices for its millions of beneficiaries. Result: Medicare recipients fall into the “doughnut hole” earlier each year and the government picks up the ever-exploding tab on the back end. Pretty neat business model for Big Pharma, huh?

There is only one way to fight the pharmaceutical nazis and that is to give the government the mandate and the tools to take down the drug monopolies. Teddy Roosevelt did a good job of breaking up the coal, railroad and other industrial monopolies of his day. Breaking up monopolies encourages the rise of small businesses, fosters wider competition and keeps prices down. Today, we desperately need a true free market in the pharmaceutical sector. To get it we will need politicians who care more about the public good than about campaign contributions from Big Pharma.