- The story of Mylan’s giant EpiPen price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America's unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.
I'm kind of surprised that the author doesn't make the distinction between patent protected drugs and non-protected drugs (or devices). Sovaldi is a new thing that does something that nothing else can do. EpiPen is an old thing that does something that lots of other things can do, but does it slightly better. Gilead has an internationally sanctioned monopoly on Solvaldi (for a limited time), whereas EpiPen has taken regulatory capture to its logical, absurd conclusion (as did Turing with daraprim). The two are far different, and beyond the high prices, I don't really see much of an analogy.
Scott Alexander was kind of surprised that the author doesn't make the distinction between drugs and chairs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs. The regulatory capture story is impressive.Let me ask Vox a question: when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?
Along the same lines of a broken American Health Care system, see the following article: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/08/29/491543167/audits-of-some-medicare-advantage-plans-reveal-pervasive-overcharging Cost accounting and true financial insight into every aspect of healthcare needs to happen (from pharmaceuticals, to insurance, to health systems themselves).