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Tag: epipen
Clinton Expected To Hit Wells Fargo In Speech On ‘Bad Corporate Actors’

Clinton Expected To Hit Wells Fargo In Speech On ‘Bad Corporate Actors’

 

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (Reuters) – U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday will unveil a plan to make it easier for consumers to take legal action against “bad corporate actors,” citing Wells Fargo & Co and Mylan Pharmaceuticals, according to a campaign official.

While campaigning in Ohio, the Democratic nominee will explain how she would, if elected on Nov. 8, curb the prevalence of contractual clauses that require consumers, employees and other individuals to resolve legal disputes in private arbitration proceedings instead of in courts, her campaign said. Mandatory arbitration clauses sometimes require that claims be pursued on an individual basis instead of on behalf of a class of similarly situated individuals. Consumer advocates say this makes it prohibitively expensive to take legal action.

Clinton will call on the U.S. Congress to give agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Labor the authority to restrict the use of arbitration clauses in consumer, employment and antitrust agreements, according to a preliminary plan reviewed by Reuters.

Clinton will also discuss how she believes that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies already have the authority to curb the use of such clauses under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The planning document said she would urge the Securities and Exchange Commission to exercise its authority to make related rules authorized by the financial reform law. Wells Fargo is expected to be in the crosshairs when Clinton discusses how she would curb mandatory arbitration clauses.

For years, the bank’s employees opened as many as 2 million checking, savings and credit card accounts without the customers’ permission in order to meet sales quotas. Wells Fargo reached a $190 million settlement with federal regulators earlier this month.

When Wells Fargo chief John Stumpf testified before Congress recently about the unauthorized accounts, he said he did not expect the bank to waive a clause signed by its customers in order to open their authorized accounts. The clause said they would arbitrate disputes instead of suing Wells Fargo in court.

Democratic lawmakers in Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called on Wells Fargo to toss out the mandatory arbitration clause and allow customers to sue.

Clinton is also expected to criticize Mylan for sharply raising without justification the price of EpiPens, which deliver life-saving drugs to those with allergies. The criticism will be part of a larger push to curb excessive market concentration and encourage competition that benefits consumers, her campaign said.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

IMAGE: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton boards her campaign plane in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States October 2, 2016.  REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Could Innovative California Lower Drug Prices For Everyone?

California may soon drive a hole through Washington’s tolerance for — and protection of — price gouging on drugs. A measure on the November ballot, Proposition 61, would bar state agencies from paying more for prescription drugs than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs does.

Congress generally prohibits the U.S. government from negotiating prescription drug prices. The VA is an exception. Federal law ensures that it obtains a discount of at least 24 percent off a drug’s list price.

Other countries don’t let drugmakers abuse their citizenry with rapacious pricing. But the U.S. Congress does the drug industry’s bidding, defending business practices that bilk patients, taxpayers and anyone who buys health coverage.

That’s why Mylan got away with hiking the EpiPen price (for Americans) by 500 percent. It’s how Turing Pharmaceuticals could raise the price of a drug used by AIDS patients by some 5,000 percent.

California seems to be fighting back. As a buyer of drugs for about 4.5 million public workers, university employees and others, the state has market muscle. It can refuse to pay indecent price markups. (Prop 61 would not affect Californians on private plans.)

The pharmaceutical industry has amassed $100 million to defeat the measure. Practiced in the art of extortionate pricing, drug companies know how to wield a threat: They could refuse to sell their products to the state of California, depriving millions of needed medications.

But would that happen? I asked economist Uwe Reinhardt, the Princeton expert on health care. He thinks it unlikely.

As long as drug companies can make a profit on an already developed drug, they’re going to sell it. After all, they still make money on the drugs they sell to Canada and Europe at considerably lower prices. Other countries confront drug companies with take-it-or-leave-it propositions, and the companies relent.

We Americans, Reinhardt says, “seem haunted by the theory that unless we allow drug companies to charge us whatever they wish for a pill, innovation will stop. And we fall for that story.”

If Prop 61 became a reality, other state governments would not sit back and continue paying prices well above those charged California. So we have to consider the other scenario — that the drug companies decline to sell to California at VA prices. They would give up a large chunk of the California market but keep the price game going in the rest of the country.

Reinhardt doubts they would play this kind of hardball. Abandoning an entire market would destroy any goodwill they have with doctors and patients. The value of their company name, an intangible asset, could fall, spilling over into other things they sell. Thus, a drug company board member might think twice before authorizing that level of aggression.

Polls find 66 percent of California voters in favor of Prop 61. AARP and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation support the measure. Opponents include some patient advocate groups, fearing that the state’s refusal to pay up might limit their access to drugs. The industry, of course, is fanning those fears.

America’s drug pricing scandal reflects an odd imbalance in what we expect of fellow citizens. Our soldiers risk life and limb fighting terrorist regimes, but we seem unable to ask drug company executives to trim a few million off their exorbitant compensation for the good of the country.

Reinhardt asks, “Is it really essential to compensate the top five layers of executives of drug companies with boats and planes and villas in Tuscany to get these folks to innovate in drug therapy?” The answer is no.

It may take America’s innovator, California, to put an end to the drug pricing scam. Californians, do your duty.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached atfharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Clinton Announces Plan To Address Price Hikes On Life-Saving Drugs

Clinton Announces Plan To Address Price Hikes On Life-Saving Drugs

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hillary Clinton said on Friday that if elected to the White House, she would create an oversight panel to protect U.S. consumers from price hikes on life-saving drugs and import alternative treatments if necessary.

Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, will seek to give the panel an “aggressive new set of enforcement tools,” including the ability to levy fines and impose penalties on manufacturers when there has been an “unjustified, outlier price increase” on a long-available drug, her campaign said.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen far too many examples of drug companies raising prices excessively for long-standing, life-saving treatments with little or no new innovation or R&D,” Clinton said in a statement.

If Clinton defeats Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 election, she will need the support of the U.S. Congress to implement key measures she has proposed, such as levying fines on manufacturers responsible for unjustified price hikes.

Lawmakers have in the past resisted efforts to introduce controls on pharmaceutical prices.

But Clinton’s campaign cited Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC raising the price of the AIDS drug pyrimethamine and Mylan’s recent move to increase the cost of EpiPen for severe allergy sufferers as “troubling” examples of price hikes that have attracted scrutiny from Republican lawmakers as well as Democrats.

Drugmakers have insisted that lowering or limiting drug prices will hamper their ability to invest in research and lead to fewer new therapies.

Dr. Peter Bach, the director of a nonpartisan health policy research group at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, said Clinton’s announcement was a “flag” for drug manufacturers that her administration would notice and respond to steep price hikes.

“It’s a response to the broader industry phenomenon of generating added profits by raising the price of drugs for which there is no competition,” Bach said, saying the campaign was focusing on a “sub category” of manufacturers that had not invested heavily in developing the drug.

Bach said he was contacted by the Clinton campaign about his work on drug pricing but had not advised the campaign in a formal capacity.

‘BOLD IDEA’

The oversight panel would be made up of representatives from existing public health and consumer protection agencies who convene to examine the scope of a drug increase, the manufacturer’s production cost and the treatment’s relative value to patients and public health, Clinton’s campaign said.

In cases where a determined unjustified price hike is accompanied by insufficient market competition, Clinton’s administration would intervene to purchase alternative drugs from comparably regulated markets or assist manufacturers in bringing the product to market in the United States.

Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, called it a “bold idea” to get the federal government “involved in helping stabilizing some of these generic drug markets.”

Until recently, there was a lengthy wait for generic drug approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Although the time line has shortened, there is often not enough consistent demand for manufacturers to enter the U.S. market, Kesselheim said.

“Having the government get involved as a long-term purchaser of these products creates a stockpile to stabilize the market,” Kesselheim said.

Kesselheim has testified before Congress about high-cost generic and long-available drugs and spoke to Clinton’s campaign about his research as it developed its proposals.

(Reporting by Amanda Becker; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Photo: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addresses the National Convention of the American Legion in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S., August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Bryan Woolston

How Can A CEO Feel Good About Being Vile?

How Can A CEO Feel Good About Being Vile?

Corporate price gouging is never nice. But gouging people on the price of medicines they rely on to stay alive is worse than not nice — it’s predaceously evil.

And if you think corporate morality can’t go lower than that, how about gouging people on the price of a life-saving medicine in order to jack up the personal pay of a drug maker’s CEO? That’s the bottom level of grotesque immorality where Heather Bresch dwells. She is chief executive of Mylan, a pharmaceutical profiteer that markets the EpiPen medical device, which literally is a lifesaver for people who suffer deadly anaphylaxis allergy attacks.

These allergy attacks kill nearly 200 people a year in the U.S. alone. Within seconds, something as common as peanuts or a bee sting can cause sever rash, swelling of the airways, drops in blood pressure, shock, and if not treated right away, death. So, naturally, we would want to increase access to the life-saving medicine that prevents these attacks, right?

Increasing that access is hard to do at today’s price. For years, a two-shot packet of EpiPens cost under $100, but Mylan bought the rights to the injectable drug in 2007, gained monopoly control of the market, and in 2012 suddenly began sticking dependent patients again and again with drastic price hikes. Now, the two-pack averages more than $600, with some paying above $900!

Drug makers routinely claim they must charge high prices to recoup their cost of developing their products — but Mylan didn’t develop the EpiPen, taxpayers did. The original research was initiated by the Pentagon back in 1973. Today, the device and the medicine in it cost Mylan only a few dollars to produce, and the product itself is essentially unchanged from when Mylan bought it. So the company’s only real contribution to the EpiPen has been to raise its price by more than 600 percent — a shameful act of sheer profiteering that rips off hundreds of thousands of users and endangers the lives of those families who simply can’t afford it.

Mylan’s CEO, the one responsible for this price gouge, regards herself as a self-made corporate success story — a woman who came out of hard-scrabble West Virginia and scrambled to the top of the food chain at Mylan. “There is a work ethic and grit about [West Virginia] that allows me to help make a difference,” Bresch told the New York Times.

Well, yes, grit, hard work — and having the advantage of being the daughter of the state’s former governor and current US Senator, Joe Manchin III. Take the MBA degree she got from West Virginia University, an academic credential bestowed on her 10 years after she left the school, having completed only about half of the coursework required to get a degree. The state university later conceded that Bresch was awarded this business degree… well, because her father was governor at the time, overseeing the school’s budget. It’s this sort of ethical “grit” that Mylan’s chief exec has employed to pick the pockets of thousands of vulnerable customers who rely on EpiPen.

Heather’s greed has sparked a furious public backlash, leading to congressional investigations. But, again, her “grit” might pay off, for she has bought off several top allergy-patient advocacy groups who are not backing the people. Why? Because she’s been dispensing millions of dollars to them in PR grants, making them “allies” in her blatant price-gouging scheme.

One thing that has risen higher than EpiPen’s price: CEO Heather Bresch’s paycheck. It’s up by 671 percent since 2007, and last year alone she pocketed $18.9 million! But I wonder — is that enough to make her feel good about being so vile? Of Course, Congress and the courts will do nothing to deter her and the other Big Pharma gougers — but surely the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno has rooms reserved for all of them.