EpiPen price spike: Daughter of Dem senator takes advantage of FDA red tape to exploit monopoly

Just like earlier this year with Martin Shkreli and Daraprim, the Internet is full of outrage the past few days over the action of Mylan CEO Heather Fausch to raise the price of the live-saving drug EpiPen to $500 per unit. And as always happens, politicians are getting into the act, particularly Hillary Clinton, who raged that Mylan must reduce the price immediately - as if pharmaceutical companies check with candidates for political office in setting their pricing. But if Hillary really wants to manifest her rage - as if it were anything but calculated for her own benefit - she should turn it inward toward herself and the Democratic Party. Because everything about this can be traced back to Democrats. Let's start with the fact that Fausch is the daughter of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia). That makes it a little awkward for the denizens of Washington to haul her in front of congressional committees for a grilling on her greed, you think? But the truly uncomfortable truth for Democrats is that the EpiPen price spike is not so much the product of "greed" as it is the product of one company having a monopoly. And that the direct result of the Democrat-controlled Food and Drug Administration's persistent refusal to allow anyone to compete with Mylan in the sale of EpiPen, as the Wall Street Journal explains:

Thus EpiPen should be open to generic competition, which cuts prices dramatically for most other old medicines. Competitors have been trying for years to challenge Mylan’s EpiPen franchise with low-cost alternatives—only to become entangled in the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory afflatus. Approving a generic copy that is biologically equivalent to a branded drug is simple, but the FDA maintains no clear and consistent principles for generic drug-delivery devices like auto injectors or asthma inhalers. How does a company prove that a generic device is the same as the original product if there are notional differences, even if the differences don’t matter to the end result? In this case, that means immediately injecting a kid in anaphylactic shock with epinephrine—which is not complex medical engineering. But no company has been able to do so to the FDA’s satisfaction. Last year Sanofi withdrew an EpiPen rival called Auvi-Q that was introduced in 2013, after merely 26 cases in which the device malfunctioned and delivered an inaccurate dose. Though the recall was voluntary and the FDA process is not transparent, such extraordinary actions are never done without agency involvement. This suggests a regulatory motive other than patient safety. Then in February the FDA rejected Teva’s generic EpiPen application. In June the FDA required a San Diego-based company called Adamis to expand patient trials and reliability studies for still another auto-injector rival.

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The FDA pulls crap like this all the time. This is the exact same reason Turin was able to gain a monopoly and hike the price of Daraprim, and now we're seeing it again with Mylan and EpiPen. Pharmaceutical companies know that they can charge prices like this because most patients are covered by insurance and the insurers will grumble and pay the bills. And that, by the way, is another reason you can tie this to Democrats. They're the ones who hate the idea of patients self-paying for medical care, and want to make everyone dependent on third-party payers heavily regulated by the government. This is what you get when third-parties pay for everything. You get prices up the wazoo because drugmakers know they can avoid competition, and the deep-pocketed insurers will pay the bills and then pass the costs onto policyholders in the form of higher premiums. If the occasional family gets screwed because it has no drug coverage but needs the drug anyway, too damn bad. That's how Washington Democrats designed the system, and the now-collapsing model of ObamaCare doubled down on it to the enth degree. This is the result. Basic competition would make monopoly price spikes like this impossible. But as it stands, Democrat regulators prevent competition and grease the skids for Democrat CEOs to jack prices, only to become the target of fake outrage by a Democrat presidential nominee who I guarantee you will keep this system alive and well if she becomes president. If voters only knew why these things really happen, they would make very different choices in the voting booth. But they don't, so they don't.