Rats at #Mylan nailed for millions over Medicaid overcharging scam

Drugmaker Mylan will pay $465 million to settle allegations that it overbilled Medicaid for its life-saving EpiPen, ending one of the controversies over the soaring price of the emergency allergy injection.

The federal government says EpiPen is a branded drug, meaning Mylan should have been paying Medicaid a far higher rebate under the government’s complex pricing rules.

Drugmakers are required to pay Medicaid rebates of just 13 percent for generic products it purchases, versus a 23.1 percent rebate for brand-name drugs, which cost far more.

Mylan has become the latest example of pharmaceutical industry price-gouging, for hiking the price of a pair of EpiPens from $94 in 2007, when it acquired the product, to $608 this year, despite making no substantive improvement to EpiPens over that stretch. Meanwhile, analysts and others have estimated that it costs less than $10 to produce one EpiPen.

More details at: Mylan to pay $465 million over Medicaid overcharging – SFGate

1%ers win again! Jerry Brown slams EpiPen maker…then signs their bill

Gov. Jerry Brown took the unusual step of castigating a specific pharmaceutical company as he signed legislation Friday allowing more businesses and colleges to stock epinephrine auto-injectors, better known as EpiPens.

Like the 1%ers who run Mylan care what Jerry Brown thinks about them.

Assembly Bill 1386 was brought to legislators by Mylan, the EpiPen maker that has faced public criticism over the rising price of the life-saving devices.

Brown said in a signing message that he was endorsing the legislation because the devices “have the potential to save the life of a person suffering a severe allergic reaction,” but he upbraided Mylan for “pricing maneuvers” that have seen the price of EpiPens explode by 500 percent as its CEO’s salary rose.“

Accompanying Brown’s signing message was a letter to Congress urging federal lawmakers to “take quick and decisive steps to rein in this kind of predatory pricing, which inflates the costs of health care and too often prevents patients from getting the medications they need.”

Great, just great. The 1%ers win again. They don’t care what Jerry Brown thinks of them, they just want the money. Now they have it.

Source: The Sacramento Bee

How legislators sold you out to #EpiPen for 30 pieces of silver

Pharmaceutical heavyweight Mylan, the latest poster child for drug-industry greed, finally stuck up for itself Thursday.

It argued that “the system,” not avarice, was to blame for the company jacking up the price of EpiPens, a common (and life-saving) allergy remedy, by over 400%.

“Look, no one’s more frustrated than me,” Mylan Chief Executive Heather Bresch declared on CNBC.

Wrong! No one in the drug industry scored more free cash than this lying asshole. Actually, millions of people — those with chronic medical conditions or other illnesses — are more frustrated than her.

Despite Mylan’s offer Thursday of discount coupons for some EpiPen users, the only system at work here is a cash-fat industry routinely preying on sick people. It’s a system that the drug industry will do whatever’s necessary to protect.

Mylan’s money-grubbing approach to EpiPens is only the latest example of a drug company mercilessly putting the squeeze on patients.

Source: The Los Angeles Times