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EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

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Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#211

Post by icebraining »

Ironchefpython wrote: post #200

> selling service contracts, [...] The price is still $0 and there are still no regulations on it. I assume at this point that you're being paid to shill some political viewpoint on the internet, because you just explained that the price of software isn't actually zero, because it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract, and creating a company that employs the developers t…

I assume at this point that you're being paid to shill some political viewpoint on the internet, because you just explained that the price of software isn't actually zero, because it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract

Yet here I am, using self-hosted Gitlab without having paid for a service contract, to write code for Odoo without having to pay for a service contract, using Nginx as a frontend proxy without having paid for a service contract and deploying it with Ansible without having paid for a service contract, on Ubuntu without having paid for a service contract.

Sure doesn't sound unusable to me.

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#212

Post by dlitz »

refurb wrote: post #181
bobdole1234 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much fixed as "Canada doesn't insist that everyone make separate deals so everyone can get fucked harder". It turns out when you have millions of people dealing together as a block, they have much more bargaining power.

That's not why Canada gets better prices. United Healthcare has 42M members which is bigger than the entire population of Canada.

Yes, apparently Canada has something called the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board:

http://pmprb-cepmb.gc.ca/about-us/frequently-asked-questions

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#213

Post by icebraining »

Retric wrote: post #97
curiousgeorgio wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The manufacturer is obligated to (1) obey the law, and (2) maximize profits for shareholders. If you have a problem with the current situation, blame the government/laws[1], not the company. [1] Blame is justifiably attributed to the government whether you believe the fix is a freer market (to reduce the costs associated with bringing suitable competitors to market) or you believe regulation should prevent this from…

Company misbehaves, government nationalizes them. It's a perfectly valid approach often used in the US, which places the blame on the company not the government as it should be. Sure, we mostly stopped doing this for various stupid reasons, but legally it's sill an option.

When was this done, and how did it go?

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#214

Post by Johnny555 »

curiousgeorgio wrote: post #123
mikeash wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(2) is a myth: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor... (1) seems like a total cop-out to me. By that logic, you can blame everything on the government. Some guy murders his family in a fit of rage? Government should have done a better job preventing it. Also, part of the point of this kind of outrage is to punish these companies for their behavior so that the evil choice is not the most profit…

If corporations don't have an obligation to maximize profits for shareholders, then you'd better try and take that argument to shareholders rather than believe someone's opinion piece on the matter. I didn't say corporations are legally required to seek profits, but they do have profit-seeking obligations in most cases. Without investors' expectations of future profits, those companies wouldn't exist in the first pla…

Fiduciary obligation is complicated and jacking up prices in the short term result in lower profit than keeping prices lower -- if this company wanted to keep the price of the product low, they could easily justify it by arguing that indiscriminately raising the price would invite government regulation and price control (or invite more competition), which would reduce profits in the long run.

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#215

Post by CalRobert »

curiousgeorgio wrote: post #105
hackuser wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government enforces some minimum safety standards I think this understates the safety regulations for automobiles by quite a bit. Maybe there's an example of an industry which makes lightly regulated, dangerous products, but I don't think cars are it.

True - the government's automobile safety standards are far from trivial, but there's no denying that the difference in safety between the cheapest smart car on the road and the safest car on the road is huge . In a head-on collision between the two, there's absolutely no contest. Asking why the government should allow an EpiPen competitor with a 0.1% higher failure rate is akin to asking why the government should al…

As a road user (walker, cyclist, occasional runner) I consider small vehicles that are easy to see around and above far safer than heavy, bulky vehicles.

Cars aren't designed for the safety of anyone but their occupants, though.

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#216

Post by Johnny555 »

Mandatum wrote: post #89
kabdib wrote: post #78

If your kid is allergic and needs an EpiPen (or something like it), most school districts will not allow the child to attend class unless they have one at the school. Maybe two. And of course you have to carry them. There's another two. So that's $2400. Out of pocket if you don't have insurance, or if your insurance doesn't pay. The EpiPen manufacturers are abusing their monopoly.

Given the proper age, teaching kids to use syringe/vials or having a school nurse that can administer epinephrine would be a much cheaper alternative. EpiPens are purely about the delivery mechanism. Stabbing a syringe into your thigh and injecting a predetermined amount of epinephrine into your leg isn't majorly complicated. Maybe having a single pen on the kid and vials/syringes at the school would be a cheaper opt…

I don't think you've ever seen a child in Anaphylactic Shock if you think all you need to do is train the child to use a vial and needle. Even training school personnel is not a great idea - While an ER nurse or paramedic can handle it because they give injections every day, a teacher or even a school nurse may go for years without ever needing to do an epinephrine injection and the stress and inexperience may make them unable to perform under pressure of having a child dying in front of them.

An IM injection is easy to do when you're calm, but just filling the syringe can be difficult when you're under intense pressure.

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#217

Post by retSava »

JshWright wrote: post #154
invaliddata wrote: post #146

The adrenaclick generic is much cheaper than the epipen, with or without insurance. Although technically different epinephrine auto injectors cannot be substituted (you can only be prescribed the one written by your doctor, or its generic equivalent), practically speaking the only difference between the epipen and the adrenaclick design is the instructions for use. I would hope there isn't a case of doctors being una…

I don't understand why a prepackaged vial/syringe kit isn't readily available for epinephrine. It works just fine for glucagon... http://www.childrenwithdiabetes.com/d_0n_022.htm We're literally talking about $1 worth of epinephrine, a $0.50 syringe, and a couple cents worth of injection molded plastic case...

Probably because that is not what matters. With the epipen, I can just jam it into my daughters thigh, straight through thick winter clothing and all. I don't need to ensure she gets the dosage right, nor that the syringe doesn't break.

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#218

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #205
Ironchefpython wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is quite a remarkable coincidence that medical costs angled steeply upward immediately after heavy regulation and government involvement in it began. Regulation didn't give people more money to spend on medicine. Offshoring jobs to China drive down prices of consumer goods to make more money available as a consumer surplus that could be captured by healthcare. If the price of food increased, the price of housing…

> could be captured by healthcare. Why wouldn't it be captured by farmers? or carmakers? > all of financial theory AND history Can you give case history of a company that maintained a monopoly via periodic dumping to bankrupt any competitors? I'm not aware of one, and no, Standard Oil is not one (see the book "Titan" about it). I've read many econ/history books, and none them put forward your dumping theory. Do you h…

[deleted]

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#219

Post by chaostheory »

Cyph0n wrote: post #28
gmisra wrote: post #18

One of the early on-line responses was "maybe we can figure out how to 3D print these cases". It turns out that an Epi-pen is just a plastic safety housing around a normal syringe. Some discussions: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4y5481/cost_of_epipen... https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/4y7f26/epipen_f...

That second discussion got heated quite fast. I agree with the downvoters though. 3D printing a medical device is not something to take lightly. Edit: Here's why I agree. You download this design from the internet, and 3D print the parts. You then assemble it. Awesome! Some time later, you get an allergic reaction. You use the pen, but it fails to work correctly. Who's responsible? The designer? You (if you're alive)…

Sounds like an opportunity for a startup...

Re: EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

#220

Post by jaekwon »

icebraining wrote: post #210
Ironchefpython wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only sectors of the economy where significant, lasting shortages occur are the ones most heavily regulated. So you're saying that Petroleum Exporting Countries would never say... create an Organization intended to increase the price of oil? Or the DeBeers wouldn't collude with diamond producers to limit the availability of diamonds to increase the price? Or that manufacturers and distributors of light bulbs, ly…

So you're saying that Petroleum Exporting Countries would never say... create an Organization intended to increase the price of oil? How does that help your case? The members of that organization are governments, not companies. OPEC is regulation.

I'm curious why people are downvoting this.
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