Mylan CEO Heather Bresch took the stage on Thursday, ready for a confrontation.
Chief executive for the now-infamous pharmaceutical company that hiked the price of the EpiPenthat ubiquitous device so many children (and plenty of adults) depend on in the event of a life-threatening allergic reactionBresch knew she wasn’t the most popular one in the room.
Even at a conference full of like-minded healthcare professionals, she faced a hostile crowd.
“Considering all the good work you’ve done with HIV,” one audience member at the Forbes Healthcare Summit asked about Mylan, “why did you ruin it with the EpiPen?”
As questions go, it’s a good one. In late August, consumers started to notice the EpiPens they had to buy for their children seemed to have jumped in price. The story spread. As it turned out, Mylan had repeatedly raised the price of an EpiPen after the pharmaceutical company purchased rights to the product in 2007. At that time, an EpiPen cost about $50.
In 2016, EpiPens were sold only in two-packs for $600.
Making a bad P.R. problem worse, in that nine-year timespan, Mylan’s profits soared. And the EpiPenwith no real competitors, and no market forces to stand in the way of price increaseswas the company’s cash cow, bringing in $1 billion a year.
After weeks of public outcry, Mylan finally relented and agreed to make a lower-cost version of the name-brand EpiPen. The device can’t quite have a true generic, since it’s a tool, rather than a patented drug.
“We got a lot right with the EpiPen. We got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong,” Bresch said Thursday in a panel with Matthew Herper, an editor at Forbes.
And although Bresch claimed responsibility for Mylan’s price gouging”We absolutely raised the price and take full responsibility for that”it wasn’t quite enough. To healthcare professionals, Mylan’s actions weren’t exactly evil, just dumb.
“Why didn’t you see this coming?” Herper asked Bresch, referring to massive public backlash after nine years of price hikes.
Bresch brandished two EpiPens during her 20-minute question-and-answer session, one from 2007, and one from 2016. She used the visual to demonstrate all the supposed improvements Mylan poured into the product over nearly a decade.
Plus, Bresch said, Mylan increased awareness of EpiPens, and spent millions lobbying for legislation that would allow children to use EpiPens whenever needed in schools.
Those caveats weren’t enough to persuade healthcare’s top executives of Mylan’s recovery. They also won’t be enough to persuade the public. Bresch declined to testify at a Congressional hearing the day before the Forbes summit, igniting an entirely new controversy.
One audience member in the preface to a question compared Bresch to the poster boy for greedy drug companies, Martin Shkreli. The rest of the room stayed silent throughout the panel, only laughing awkwardly when no one else dared to ask anything.
But the company’s apology tour is really just beginningand it’ll have to move far beyond the softball setting of a healthcare conference.
Bresch will continue to cite Mylan’s work on allergy awareness (which had the dual effect of helping to sell more EpiPens) and its work on other drugs, like the HIV medication one audience member mentioned. And the company can continue to roll out their standard justification for what happened, too: That no one knew how high-deductible plansushered in by the Affordable Care Actwould pass costs onto the consumer.
But all anyone will remember of this particular moment in medicine is that time a bunch of parents had to buy their kids a $600 EpiPen, to say nothing of those who couldn’t afford to. The question, then, is how long that memory will last, and how long we’ll remember it in the years to come.
