Dispatches University has in it links to a few articles about the EpiPen situation — and here is Mytheos Holt nailing it over at Townhall.com:
If you want to see corporate welfare and cronyism in action, there is no better place to look than the pharmaceutical industry. Having more or less treated Obamacare as a wishlist, then hired the architect behind it, then turned Hillary Clinton into their personal puppet, Big Pharma has less shame about gaming the system than Clinton does about using Bleachbit.
But however repulsive pharma’s behavior is, there is one bright side to it. At a certain point, corruption becomes a problem not merely from an ethics standpoint, but because corrupt companies become blind to the very market signals that tell them when they’re on the verge of terrible mistakes.
Exhibit A: The scandal over EpiPen price gouging, which hit the media last month and has continued to be a thorn in the side of the industry as more information surfaces.
For those living under a rock, Mylan, the company responsible for manufacturing EpiPen injections, has increased the price for the life-saving drug by huge margins — sixfold, in fact. This is not merely callous, but also stupid, as the medication contained in EpiPens is off-patent, meaning that generic manufacturers could easily sell it cheaper and outcompete Mylan. In this respect, the scandal bears a striking resemblance to the similar Daraprim pricing scandal perpetrated by the infamous “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.
And unlike Shkreli, who seems to be an outlier because he’s essentially a professional troll, Mylan’s CEO has a much more problematic background: She’s the daughter of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Small wonder, then, that the Wall Street Journal has laid the blame for EpiPen’s continuing price hikes at the door of the federal government. Crony capitalism is funny that way.
Read more: Townhall
Image credit: www.townhall.com.
