The judicial death penalty we impose on criminals might be defendable ethically, but the death penalty we impose on our own citizens due to greed and cruelty is indefensible, cruel, and monstrous. Just so a few beyond-rich people can get even richer. Disgusting.
Step 2: Ban doctor kickbacks including "educational seminars" in the Caribbean.
Step 3: Join the rest of the western world and establish a single payer system.
This way we can separate the wheat from the chaff. Truly revolutionary products can still charge high patent-protected prices by their exclusive manufacturers. OTOH marketing driven products with weak perceived advantages won't be able to charge the high prices as they do now. In the Epi-pen case, the patent owner will still be the exclusive manufacturer. But if they raise the price by 400% to all the marketers the marketers may choose to promote other generic products instead.
> A "yes" vote supports regulating drug prices by requiring state agencies to pay the same prices that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (USDVA) pays for prescription drugs.
Advocacy site: http://yeson61.com/
Most of Mylan's drug portfolio has come from acquisitions of other companies. They sell branded drugs that have been synthesized years ago by other people.
The only R&D this company is doing is who to bribe in Congress and how to extort more money from the American public. True free markets at work.
You say this like they aren't doing R&D. But the industry has just broken up into two sub-industries: the big firms who specialize in large-scale distribution, and the small firms who mostly die but some create the new successful drugs, and then get acquired.
This is my pet peeve. If you are going to regurgitate a talking point, please regurgitate the _right_ talking point. They spend more on marketing and administration. You know, useless stuff like HR, IT, etc. What company need stupid stuff like that?
Say what you want about America, but it can't be denied that the majority of drugs in the last few decades which the world depends on has been thanks to the American government, American companies, and the American people.
One way to fix the price would be simply to stop giving away our inventions for pennies, and get the rest of the world's governments to actually pay a fair price if they want to use our products.
It is much more likely that, given our largely unregulated market for medicine, the market is pricing medicines in this country as expected by theory: as high as the market will bear. No ethics or morals apply, just pure profit. Whether that is OK or not depends on whether you happen to critically need those medicines and can afford them.
Other countries are allowed to negotiate the price of drugs and/or restraint profits made, so their prices for the same drugs are often significantly lower. Companies in those countries still make a profit, just less than here.
Also pharmaceutical spending on R&D is much lower than many other industries.
Here's the relevant quote from the article you linked:
"The patents that currently prevent a generic form of EpiPen
are on the injector device itself, not the medicine inside.
So, while you can’t get a generic EpiPen, there are
alternatives that use epinephrine."