Recently, the company that makes EpiPens, Mylan, made headlines when they raised the price of the lifesaving drug from $56.61 to $317.82—a massive surge in price. The outrage was intense and sudden; our children need these to live, many cried out. Under intense fire from all sides, the company eventually caved and offered to produce a generic version of their own product—a strange move to say the least—and even offered to send $300 vouchers to insured patients to cover the new co-pays, but though some may interpret that as a victory for patients, the company’s actions overall will set them up to enrich their top executives and shareholders at the cost of us all. Furthermore, this incident is just the latest in a string of many, another instance of wealthy executives at Big Pharma enriching themselves at the expense of human lives.
Supposing then that insured patients largely continue to use EpiPen, now that they have vouchers to cover their end of the expense, we can all look forward to hiked premiums as the insurance companies are forced to pick up a greater amount of slack for a ubiquitous drug. Furthermore, while almost all states simply allow schools to stock epinephrine, several states require it to be stocked. Now, if one adds together all of the schools in those states: California, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Michigan, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, the number comes out to 26,109 schools. And, given that federal funding is being used by state bureaucrats to actually buy the medicine, we can safely assume that price won’t impact the use of EpiPens in a majority of these schools. Assuming that the schools in those required states buy just a single two-pack of EpiPens, Mylan has just made $15,600,000 off of their immoral practices—and off of the taxpayer’s back. Add in the fact that every state except Hawai’i explicitly allows the use of epinephrine, and many of these schools will be buying brand-name EpiPens, most likely, and Mylan’s CEO is looking forward to a nice payday indeed.
Why all of this focus on raising the price? As always with these entities, the answer lies with the share price. In 2014, a peculiar bonus system was set up for Mylan’s executives. For every dollar above $53.33 that the price goes, the CEO, Heather Bresch, could get $1,400,000 in bonuses, up to a stock price of $73.33. Other executives in the company would also receive millions in these bonuses—including up to one hundred lower-level executives.
Some would say that this is the duty of corporations, to make money for the shareholders, and indeed, the modern corporation has always existed as a means of making profit. Some would blame the broken American healthcare system for this—and by all means, this is just another instance in which our system, or lack thereof, has failed us. But at the same time, this is a corporation exploiting the system for the benefit of executives and shareholders. If, as the law says, corporations supposedly have personhood, with rights to free speech and privacy, why are so many of them sociopaths? Acting for one’s own benefits with reckless disregard for others, are the hallmarks of a sociopath. So the question I would pose is, why do we, as a society, tolerate this sociopathic behavior by corporations? Even if we all scream on the internet for a while, stomp our feet, or write angry articles that nobody reads on totally hip new social media platforms, at the end of the day, Heather Bresch and her colleagues are going to make millions of dollars off of this decision to hike the price of a life-saving medicine. And we, as a society, are going to allow that.
God bless America.
