USA Today Helps Mylan Sell an Extortionate Price for EpiPen

That depends on when you start the clock.

The drug-maker announced that it would be selling an unbranded version of the lifesaving anti-allergy device for $300 for a two-pack.  That’s actually a little more than a 50 percent reduction from the current list price; a two-pack of EpiPens generally sells for $608.

But that’s the recently jacked-up price that sparked the outrage that forced Mylan to offer a generic alternative. A year ago, an EpiPen set was going for $461. That would make the $300 price a 35 percent reduction, not 50 percent.

Even that makes the generic price sound like more of a bargain than it is. As recently as July 2013, you could buy two for $264—making the new generic price a 14 percent increase.

And if you go back to 2007, when Mylan acquired the rights to the EpiPen brand, the list price then for two devices was $94. That’s $109 in 2016 dollars—so, on that basis, Mylan’s generic EpiPen is actually a 175 percent price hike.

You don’t need time travel to make the generic EpiPen a bad deal, though; you just need to travel across the border into Canada, where a single pen retails for about $120 in Canadian money, which is about $92 in US currency. In France, where the device is made by a company Mylan recently bought,  a twin-pack sells for about $85—or 28 percent of Mylan’s new “discount” price.

Raising prices exorbitantly so that you can present a slightly less extortionate price as a “sale” is a time-honored marketing tradition. USA Today is under no obligation to feature the scam in a headline, however.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be followed on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

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