EpiPen price could lead to stiffer regulations

Citizen Action Wisconsin, and other groups, calling out lawmakers

The high cost of a lifesaving drug has some calling for stiffer regulations.
Citizen Action of Wisconsin is among the groups calling out lawmakers to hammer down on companies like Mylan, the maker of the EpiPen, which has been at the center of a fight over excessive prescription drug profits.
“Not just the Epipen,” Kevin Kane with Citizen Action said. “Those drugs like Narcan – for those who are experiencing overdoes – others involving heart attacks.
“These companies are using their market monopoly power, in some respects, to extract huge profits and it’s getting bigger every single year.”
Kane’s group supports a new proposal in Madison that would force companies like Mylan to justify its pricing. 
“They’re sort of figuring out how to maximize profits on selling water to somebody in the desert,” Kane said. “When you need an EpiPen, you will do almost anything. It’s a matter of life and death.”
Mylan has raised the cost of the EpiPen by 500 percent over the last 10 years.
“I am running a business,” Mylan CEO Heather Bresch told the New York Times. “I am a for-profit business. I am not hiding from that.”
It’s not just the rising costs of the EpiPen that’s infuriated the public. It’s also Bresch’s salary, which was around $2.5 million in 2007 and nearly $19 million today.
Just this week, the company vowed to market a cheaper, generic form of the EpiPen for around $300.
It has also spurred other companies to come up with alternatives to consumers, like Imprimis Pharmaceuticals.
“The cost of epinephrine is literally less than a Big Mac,” Mark Baum with the company told CNN of EpiPen’s main ingredient.
Imprimis is going to offer a $100 version of the Epipen, but with one milligram of epinephrine, he said, pointing out the EpiPen uses three times more than needed.
EpiPens cost $124 in 2009. Just weeks ago, they cost $609 – raising costs 15 times during that span.