Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

I’m so mad I could spit.

I watched an interview yesterday on CNBC with the CEO of Mylan, which is coming under fire for enormous price hikes on their Epipen product, which helps people suffering severe allergic reactions stay alive. Now it’s pay up or stay alive. Sound familiar?

CLICK HERE for the interview, then come back.

Well, it looks like common sense isn’t lacking for just male CEOs in this country. At first glance, you might think this is a woman who doesn’t get it. But she gets it, far more than she tries to show in this interview. Only what she gets is different from what the rest of us who depend on a drug to stay alive gets.

Don’t give me platitudes about how the entire healthcare system is failing us without giving us detailed examples of how your company is not part of the problem. And announcing a “rebate program” for patients doesn’t count. It’s a way to hold people at arm’s length, making them fill out more paperwork, make more phone calls, dangling the carrot just out of reach. It’s also probably a tax write-off for you, though probably not as big a tax write-off as moving your “headquarters” out of the USA was. Believe me, there are MANY people who are more frustrated by this than you are. “Facts are inconvenient to headlines”? Really?

This goes back to my post from last October. This CEO’s constant misdirection on the topic of drug overpricing shows that Mylan doesn’t really care if someone dies because they can’t afford an Epipen. Why should they care? If there are ten patients with severe allergies in a room, and one of them dies because they can’t afford an Epipen, what does that mean? If I’m Mylan, it means I have to ship less product, but since I’ve raised the price of my product 600 percent in the past few years, I’m still making more money than when I had ten patients paying the lower price. Win-win!

“Pharmacy Benefit Managers” (yes, I put quotes around that faux title) that work for prescription providers like CVS/Caremark and Express Scripts are to blame too. They’re trying to get as much money as they can, and they’re pretty successful, even if no one can think of a single reason why their jobs are needed in the first place.

Recently, Slate.com has weighed in on drug overpricing to note that this kind of practice is costing insulin-dependent diabetes patients dearly too. Welcome to the party, Slate… where have you been?

So the questions are the same as before. What can be done? How do we get Congress to act? How do we get companies to stop forcing patients to choose between rent or complications, keeping the lights on versus dying?

It is abundantly clear that companies don’t care about anything except revenue. They will not budge, nor will they stop this unethical and unpatriotic practice until they are forced to do so.

I just can’t go into another post about what the diabetes community needs to do to reverse this setback for patients. We’re all tired of this, we’ve seen more than enough examples of excessive greed, and it’s starting to wear on us. But I can tell you what is needed:

The United States Government must get involved to protect patients reliant on drugs to stay alive.

This means the three branches of our federal government… the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial, must work together to determine and support policy and pricing that protects patients from seeing these kinds of increases in the future. Our government actually does have the power to do something about this, and if they’re unwilling to act, they’re as much to blame for needless complications and deaths as the drug companies and the prescription providers.

Here are a couple of ideas. I’m just spitballing here, but what the heck, it’s my blog. Let me know what you think:

Limit price increases. Simply put, enact legislation that limits how much of an increase can be implemented for drugs. All drugs. Period. With no exceptions. This is the one item where people might cry “socialism”, to which I say no one ever said anything about no profits for companies. Mylan was already making a huge profit on Epipen before their recent increases. Lilly was already making a huge profit on Humalog. Novo was already making a huge profit on Novolog. And Express Scripts was already making a huge profit on all three.

Are your company’s headquarters outside of the USA? Then the U.S. Government should set the price. Mylan (and many, many other companies, including Medtronic) have gone through a process known as “inversion”, where most or all of a company’s execs and offices remain in the USA, but all their paperwork lists them in a lower tax country, like Ireland, for example. Fine. You want to do that? The federal government should now be allowed to set the price on all medications you sell inside our borders. Actually, let’s amend that to say the Feds should set the price on all items sold to patients in my country. You were making a profit already. Enough of a profit to buy a company in another country and then make that company’s “headquarters” your own so you could skip out on paying U.S. taxes. I don’t see why we can’t say, pay taxes in our country or you have no voice on pricing. American capitalism should only extend to American companies. I know, you’re probably worried that they wouldn’t release new drugs in the USA. Trust me: they’re not going to walk away from the biggest economy in the world, regardless of what they say.

Show some guts elected officials. It’s pretty much down to you now. You are going to have to step up and protect patients. Choose to support us through your words and your actions. This is an issue that affects every registered voter in America.

Show us you’re worth voting for. #PatientsoverProfit