Thom: The price of a standard 2-set pack of EpiPens,
which has jumped over 400% in recent years, up nearly $400 since 2013, will stay right
where it is right now, around $615 a pop.
As the Chicago Tribune explains, that means insurers and employers that pay the bulk of
the EpiPen costs for many patients will continue to do so, contributing to higher health insurance
costs.
In other words, Mylan will continue to rake in the cash and damn everyone else.
Joining me now is Mike Papantonio American's lawyer and host of Ring of Fire Radio and
author of the forthcoming novel, Law and Disorder.
Pap, welcome back.
Papantonio: Thom, good to be here.
Thom: Great to have you with us.
Am I right in thinking that these changes Mylan has announced are just BS?
What actual effect do you think they'll have?
Papantonio: They don't amount to anything.
Look.
Heather Bresch the CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals just happens to be, by the way, the daughter
of Democratic senator Joe Manchin.
Joe Manchin is neither Democrat nor is he anybody who cares at all about American consumers.
She doesn't either.
Manchin is the definition of the Democrat name only and she's carried that with him.
She is the epitome of a Wall Street Democrat who has figured out a way to make a lot of
money at the cost of consumers.
Bresch decided that saving the lives of children wasn't as important, is lining her pockets
with that extra cash.
At the same time she raised the price of the EpiPens, she gave herself, Thom, and she gave
her other executives, a 600% pay raise at the cost of the health of people that need
this EpiPen.
She went from making about 2-1/2 million dollars a year to 19 million dollars a year.
It wasn't just the EpiPens her company's raised the prices on.
It's at least two dozen other drugs that they sell.
That's because Big Pharma always puts profits over patients.
There is no exception to that.
I've been doing this for 35 years.
I've never seen an exception.
It's the same story I see play out all the time in courtrooms all the time.
Don't be fooled ... By the way, Thom, you mentioned ... Don't be fooled by their announcement
today that they're lowering the price.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
What they're actually doing is changing the income requirements, as you pointed out, for
families to qualify for coupons.
That's it.
The price will stay the same but if you qualify, if you can make your way through this maze
of documents in order to get a coupon so you can keep yourself alive, that's all they're
really offering.
This is a terrible story.
This is the state of where we are with the pharmaceutical industry.
A Democrat just as bad as Republican bunch of politicians that do everything they can
to give the drug industry relief and to hell with consumers.
She is exhibit A.
This is a very ugly story and if mainstream media would pay attention to it, they would
see exactly how ugly it is.
They won't pay attention because they love the pharmaceutical industry.
Thom: Well, and this company has seen the revenue
from the EpiPens from, as I recall, around 200 million a year to 1.2 billion a year.
Obviously they're more profitable and so they re-incorporated in the Netherlands so that
they don't have to pay U.S. taxes.
Not only do we get screwed, they get the profit but they don't even pay taxes on the money
that they took from us.
Papantonio: Thom, don't miss this point.
This is Senator Manchin's daughter.
Senator Manchin is this third way Wall Street Democrat who doesn't give ... Let me just
tell you something.
I was in West Virginia having to try one of the biggest environmental cases in the state,
in America at the time, and Manchin was at every turn pushing against the people who
were affected by this, pushing against their ability to be able to recover.
He is wholly a corporate thug and his daughter now apparently doesn't fall far from the tree.
Here's the good news.
The corporate media's days of controlling the message, Thom, they're over.
Independent media outlets have been talking about price gouging stories for years.
Big Pharma spends about 4 billion, well about 4-1/2 billion dollars a year advertising with
corporate media.
Of course they're going to ignore the stories.
Let me give you an example, Thom, of how bad things are.
The markup on Lipitor is 4,600%, on Lipitor, 4,600% markup.
On Prilosec it's 69,000% markup.
Our Democratic congressional folks don't care.
Prozac, it's 224,000% markup.
Zoloft is 12,000% markup.
Those are just a few examples of the most popular U.S. medications and how they get
marked up in the United States.
This is the problem.
It's uniquely American.
Other countries don't allow this to happen.
Other countries make sure the drug industry negotiates their prices but here in the U.S.
the industry has managed to buy off Democrats.
Let me point out something.
They have actually bought off more Democrats than they have Republicans where it comes
to getting those politicians to prevent the negotiation of drug prices in the country.
The industry tells us that these high markups are because of their high cost of research
and development.
That is bunk.
The truth is the federal government, U.S. taxpayers, are the ones who fund most of the
R&D for Big Pharma to the tune of 30 billion dollars a year.
You and other taxpayers are paying for the CEO to be able to say, "Gee whiz.
We want a pay raise.
We want to go from $2 million a year to be paid $9 million a year."
They do it at your cost.
We're paying for our drugs twice.
Once for the development and again for the finished product.
Drug companies spend 20% of their budget, only 20%, on research and development.
The other 80% is spent on marketing and advertising.
This is a horrendous story.
Corporate media won't tell it because every day corporate media has some advertisement
by Merck or Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson and they don't have the damn courage to tell consumers
what's happening to them in the United States right now.