The cost of saving your child’s life has gotten a lot more expensive.
Parents getting ready for back-to-school season have another item to toss in the basket along with Trapper Keepers and boxes of pencils — and they’re facing sticker shock at the latest price increase.
Doctors and patients say the Mylan pharmaceutical company has jacked up the prices for an EpiPen — the portable device that can stop a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction — from around $100 in 2008 to $500 and up today.
That’s a hike of over 400 percent.
Now former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has weighed in, calling the Mylan company “vultures.”
Connecticut Senator Richard Bluemnthal, who pushed for emergency epinephrine to be stocked in public schools, pledged to investigate the “shocking increase.”
“Patients are calling and saying they can’t afford it,” said Dr. Douglas McMahon, an allergy specialist in Maplewood, Minnesota. “They’re between a rock and a hard place.”
Following a recall by Mylan’s chief competitor last year, the company now enjoys a near monopoly. Because of aggressive marketing and branding campaigns, and lobbying for legislation that requires the product to be stocked in schools, they have a brand dominance equal to that of Kleenex, doctors say.
About the size of a fat marker, they are carried by many parents of kids with severe allergies wherever they go — ready to jam the gizmo into their child’s thigh to deliver epinephrine and stop anaphylactic shock from a potentially fatal bee sting or bit of peanut.
And because they have a stated expiration date of one year, parents refill them annually, incurring an additional co-pay each time.