Tag: god bless the land of the free

A growing chorus is calling on the Mylan pharmaceutical company to justify its price hikes on EpiPens, a potentially life-saving medication for children and others facing fatal allergies that has little real competition.

In 2007, a two-pack of the epinephrine-filled devices went for $56.64 wholesale, according to data gathered by Connecture, a health insurance technology and data analytics company. Now it’s jumped to $365.16, an increase of 544.77 percent. Since the end of 2013, the price has gone up by 15 percent every other quarter. (That’s about $600, retail price!)

“Amazing that Epipen prices in CA & EU with prescription are about $85. No govt negotiated buy in US,” said another tweet.

Even Martin Shkreli, the disgraced former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, has weighed in. “These guys are really vultures. What drives this company’s moral compass?” he said in a phone interview.

A backlash over Mylan’s pricing tactics is shedding light on its grasp of the market. After politicians, physicians and lawmakers criticized the price of EpiPen, Mylan offered to provide more financial help to patients, saying it would cover their insurance out-of-pocket costs up to $300, from $100 previously. It also said it would expand the number of low-income patients eligible to receive company subsidies. But the company didn’t roll back EpiPen’s high list price.

Mylan’s CEO acknowledged that high retail prices of EpiPens in the United States effectively subsidize the cost of the devices when they are sold in Europe, at just $100 or $150. Many of the countries there have government-run health-care systems that limit drug prices charged by manufacturers, unlike the U.S.

The U.S. has 4.43% of the world’s population and almost 42% of the world’s population of civilian-owned guns. Since not everyone is a gun owner, that means that the typical gun owner owns more than one. In fact, they own, on average, 6.6 guns each. Two-thirds of the guns in the U.S. are in the hands of 20% of the population. Gun ownership is correlated with both gun homicide and suicide. Accordingly, the US also haa the highest rate of gun violence of any developed country.

I didn’t create that headline. It’s an onion piece, that was was written back in 2014, yet still remains hauntingly relevant.

The shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, is the 45th school shooting in the United States in the 274 days so far in 2015. Another project, Mass Shooting Tracker, has a broad definition of mass shootings. While the FBI measures a “mass shooting” as an incident when people are killed, the tracker classifies a mass shooting as an event when four or more people are shot. Using that criteria, the tracker reports that 294 known mass shootings have occurred this year.

“America is the only developed country where when someone asks if you heard about that campus shooting, you have to clarify, ‘Which one?’ That is unacceptable. Something has to change,” Colin Goddard, a survivor of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.

“There’s been another mass shooting in America — this time, in a community college in Oregon. That means there’s another community stunned with grief, and communities across the country are forced to relive their own anguish, and parents across the country who are scared because they know it might have been their families and their children. But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America — next week, or a couple of months from now.

We don’t yet know why this individual did what he did. And it’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be. But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.

Earlier this year, I answered a question in an interview by saying, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings.” And later that day, there was a mass shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. That day! Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.

And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out: We need more guns, they’ll argue. Fewer gun safety laws.

We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it, ” Barak Obama.