Pros And Cons Of Mylans

Imagine this: you are tragically diagnosed with a chronic life-threatening illness. Your only hope to survive is through medication to treat your disorder. The medicine is pricy but you can work out the costs each month. One day, you go to fill your prescriptions and realize the cost of a $13 pill has jumped to an astounding $750. You need this patented medication to survive and to afford it you end up losing your home, filing for bankruptcy, and sleeping in your car. This story sounds fictional but it is the reality for many Americans who can no longer afford their grossly overpriced medications.

"In the past two decades or so, health care has been commercialized as never before, and professionalism in medicine seems to be giving way to entrepreneurialism," commented Arnold S. Relman, professor of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School (Wekesser 66). This statement may have a great deal of bearing on reality. The tangled knot of insurers, physicians, drug companies, and hospitals that we call our health system are not as unselfish and focused on the patients' needs as people would like to think. Pharmaceutical companies are particularly ruthless, many of them spending millions of dollars per year to convince doctors to prescribe their drugs and to convince consumers that their specific brand of drug is needed in

The current debate over the Mylan Company’s near monopoly of the epinephrine market through its EpiPen shows what can happen without monopoly regulation. While the cost to produce an Epipen is around $30, the price to the consumer is around $300 each. The economic implications for a family that needs to keep the device on hand to save a life can be excessively high, the emotional results of not having one when you need one are debilitating. This monopoly is further enhanced by state-enforced regulations requiring that schools keep EpiPens in stock and the, so-called, EpiPen law enacted in 2013, which leave little incentive for other pharmaceutical companies to develop their own technology for fast-acting emergency devices. (Bartolone, 2016) Breaking Mylan’s monopoly will not only lead to new product development but lower prices for consumers for a life-saving delivery

Health care spending in the United States of America as a percentage of the economy has reached astonishing heights, equating to 17.7 percent. This number is shocking when compared to other counties; in Australia health care is 8.9 percent, in United Kingdom 9.4 percent, in Canada 11.2 percent. If the American health care system were to hypothetically become its own economy, it would be the fifth-largest in the world. While these statistics sound troubling, they lead us to look for answers about the problems surrounding our system. The first health insurance company was created in the 1930s to give all American families an equal opportunity for hospital care and eventually led to a nationwide economic and social controversy that erupted in the 1990s and continued to be shaped by the government, insurance companies, doctors, and American citizens. In this paper, I will go in to detail about the various opinions regarding the controversy, the history behind health insurance companies, and the main dilemmas brought out by the health care crisis. Greedy insurance companies combined with high costs of doctor visits and pharmaceutical drugs or the inefficient hospitals all over America can only describe the beginning to this in depth crisis. Recently, the United States health care industry has become know for the outrageous costs of insurance models, developments of various social and health services programs, and the frequent changes in medicinal technology.

The cost of health care has been at the forefront of politics for years. It is one of the most talked about topics not just in political venues but also country wide. Every American has an opinion on how our economy can be fixed and they are passionate about health care reform. The price of insurance alone causes many Americans to not have coverage. For those that can afford coverage, the struggle to pay co pays is immensely crippling their bank accounts. Of these burdens on Americans today, the most frightening fact lies in the cost of prescription medications.

One reason that is frequently cited when asking the question of why so many people in the U.S. don’t have coverage is the cost. Many populations, in particular minorities, low-income, and women cannot afford health insurance or are underinsured thus putting them at a higher risk for disease, disability and death. In the U.S in 2010, there were 50 million people uninsured (Patel & Rushefsky, 2014). Private insurance companies have denied coverage to people with preexisting conditions (as seen in the Sick Around America video) and even pregnant women, this practice illustrates the inequality and inequity issues that have permeated the health care system. The Affordable Care Act sought to remedy the issues related to health insurance coverage being accessible for all Americans but there still exists many people without

1 Kaiser Family Foundation Report on the Uninsured. Available at http://www.kff.org/uninsured/7451.cfm. 2 Danzon, P., et al. “The Impact of Price Regulation on the Launch Delay of New Drugs.” Health Economics, 2005; 14(3): 269-292. Available at http://hc.wharton.upenn.edu/danzon/html/Journal_Articles.htm. 3 The Boston Consulting Group. “Ensuring Cost Effective Access to Innovative Pharmaceuticals – Do Market Interventions Work?” April, 1999. Available at http://www.bcg.com/impact_expertise/publications/files/Ensuring_Cost_Effective_Access_Innovative_Pharmaceuticals_Apr1999.pdf 4 Thorpe, K. et al. “Differences in Disease Prevalence as a Source of the U.S.–European Health Care Spending Gap.” Health Affairs (Web Exclusive) Oct. 2, 2007. Available at www.healthaffairs.org.

The rising cost of health care has led companies to stop offering health insurance for employees, and private insurance is often too expensive for people to afford. Many families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but are unable to pay for private health insurance. Health care costs in the United States have more than doubled in the last twenty years. Insurance premiums are rising five times faster than wages, and Americans are spending more money on health care than people in any other country. The average amount one person pays per year for health care in the United States is 134 times higher than the average of other industrialized countries (“Health Care Issues”). Even people who have insurance aren’t guaranteed coverage. Many insurance companies find loopholes to avoid paying for expensive medical treatment, leaving people with massive debt from medical bills. Medical bills and illness cause over half of all personal bankruptcies in the United

As our country advances in the medical field, the costs of American healthcare expenditures are drastically increasing and the number of people purchasing medical coverage is declining. The United States healthcare system in contrast to others is recognized to be the most expensive and as a result more than fifty million American citizens are left uninsured, given the low income rate (Garson 1). Those who, in fact, purchase coverage are not properly protected, therefore other individuals do not bother wasting their money and purchasing healthcare. As soon as individuals are in need of medical attention, they happen to struggle with the preexisting conditions they suffer from because they cannot afford the desired aid. It is safe to say

Recently, there had been a controversy over the rise in pharmaceutical costs involving the EpiPen in the United States. The EpiPen, also known as adrenaline/epinephrine, is a widely used injection that is used to treat allergic reactions. This generic drug has been available for many years. The EpiPen controversy is a prime example of how monopoly

Today we live in a world where the medical system is very advanced and it allows doctors to treat almost any kind of cold, disease, or injury. This sounds good with the exception that people cannot afford those treatments unless they have Health insurance. Medical insurance is not easy to obtain, meanwhile the insurance companies want to make as much money as possible from their clients without spending a dime on them. “There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance” (Sicko). It’s not surprising that there are so many people without insurance; for the reason that the insurance providers like to give coverage to younger and healthier individuals, while the people in need of insurance are seen as a harmful to the health provider’s profits and are denied to sign up for the insurance. Michael Moore’s film “Sicko” and Jim Hightower’s issue 14 of the Lowdown show two major problems in our medical system about the so called “Universal Healthcare”. The argument that Michael’s movie makes is that the United States medical system is not as good as the medical system in Canada, United Kingdom, or Norway. You might wonder how the U.S medical system can be worse than those countries when it’s more advanced, well the treatment in those places is completely free including the stay in the hospital! In the Lowdown article we can notice another issue with our current health system such as drug companies spending more cash each year to advertise their drugs then coming up with

Patents have always been a burning topic of discussion due to its mixed response in the human society. Some people eulogize patents at the same time some criticize it for the impact on public health. Companies that develop and market patented drug always commends about the essential benefits of developing drugs to the society. In contrast, consumer always complains about the patents being the rationale behind unreasonably high price of the life-saving drugs and its limited access.

“Most of the poor people use these cheaper, generic drugs and the disease comes back more intense,” he said. “Because it is quite intense they are ready to pay any amount and they pay the highest” when they go to the public hospital for treatment. Those who are willing to pay cash are taken care of first.

On one hand the Pharma companies demanded that the patent rules and regulations be laid out in a format which circularly protects their products from major duplication, in turn saving their investment capital in the R&D going to waste. On the other hand the patent regulations has to out their act together in such a way that they adhered to the wants of the Pharma companies on one side and also seeing that the monopoly situation of one particular Pharma company does not go out of hand resulting in unjustifiable high product pricing and its scarce availability in the market. In short, they had to perform a balancing act between these two issues in the best possible way. Growth in the pharmaceutical industry is directly proportional to the anti competitive practices carried out in that industry. To prevent the same, stringent IP laws as well as competition laws need to be

If a company creates a new drug to treat a certain disease, for example, they can get a patent for it and can charge supra-competitive prices as they are the only market player, since the patent restricts other competitors from manufacturing the same medication.