Mylan’s EpiPen price hike was a scheme to stifle competition, rival claims

Re:Mylan’s EpiPen price hike was a scheme to stifle competit... by yaakov34 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @12:13PM (#14204303)

Sorry, still not seeing the good-and-evil story here. Look at the graph here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2016/10/26/epipen... (possibly what you meant by prices in line with EpiPen) - Sanofi was matching the price increases of EpiPen dollar for dollar for years, and was always a little bit more expensive. Then it went away from the market for some kind of quality control problem, and returned as a $4500 device manufactured by another company (but with a weird pricing scheme which supposedly lets anyone who needs it to buy it for low out-of-pocket costs). Honestly that graph looks like both companies conspiring to corner the market together, if anything; but who knows with the insane prices and regulations of healthcare.

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Re:Mylan’s EpiPen price hike was a scheme to stifle competit... by totalrobe on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @03:23PM (#14206128)

I am not saying either one is good or evil here, just commenting that the $4500 device is not super relevant to the actual Sanofi lawsuit.

Obviously Sanofi should have been able to massively undercut the Mylan price if there truly was xxx% profit margin built in, so it is not really apparent why they didn't do that.

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Re:Mylan’s EpiPen price hike was a scheme to stifle competit... by yaakov34 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @05:15PM (#14207058)

Well, it's like Bernie Madoff said - "there is no innocent explanation". They hiked the price from $130 to $500 while matching Mylan every step of the way; they fixed prices. Their lawyers may be good enough so that they never get charged with it, but it's clear that they did it, and they and Mylan are both exactly the same and just as guilty. And now this lawsuit seeks to cast them as some kind of underdog and victim.

My point about "good guys" was because of the whole tone of the article. A romantic story of two brothers, one of whom became a doctor, and another an engineer, so that they could invent their dream automatic injector. Except that autoinjectors are a 1950s technology, used by most militaries to deliver antidotes to chemical weapons - here's a film from 1963 which demonstrates a device that I have a hard time telling from an EpiPen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeyW8aoP8mE.

So what the hell was there to even invent, why are these devices covered by any patents at all, why is the FDA allowing just two companies to dominate the market (I am sure plenty of people would like to charge $100 for devices which cost a few dollars to manufacture), and why doesn't a lockstep price hike from $130 to $500 attract the attention of antitrust prosecutors? Because healthcare in the USA is an insane fever swamp...

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