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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 14 2017, @07:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility dept.

Dr. Lowe, from In the Pipeline, writes about the company responsible for EpiPen, with quotes taken from The New York Times:

To understand Mylan’s culture, consider a series of conversations that began inside the company in 2014.

In (2014) meetings, the executives began warning Mylan’s top leaders that the price increases seemed like unethical profiteering at the expense of sick children and adults, according to people who participated in the conversations. Over the next 16 months, those internal warnings were repeatedly aired. At one gathering, executives shared their concerns with Mylan’s chairman, Robert Coury.

Mr. Coury replied that he was untroubled. He raised both his middle fingers and explained, using colorful language, that anyone criticizing Mylan, including its employees, ought to go copulate with themselves. Critics in Congress and on Wall Street, he said, should do the same. And regulators at the Food and Drug Administration? They, too, deserved a round of anatomically challenging self-fulfillment.

[...] As the article says, the company has decided that all the criticism is just the cost of doing business, and that their business is selling EpiPens at the highest cost they can. Bad press, upset parents, calls for them to change – none of that means much.

[...] Another thing that happens when you operate this way is that other government agencies get motivated to take a closer look at you. Last fall, Mylan paid $465 million to settle a misclassification problem that led to them getting higher rebates than they should have on EpiPens distributed through Medicare. But now it appears that there’s another $1.27 billion involved, according the the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.

[...] As it happens, some of the company’s investors are trying to replace the board members, and just this morning, ISS (Institutional Shareholder Services) came down on their side. They’re recommending that shareholders vote against ten directors and against ratifying the compensation plans for the top executives. That’s a pretty big deal, since ISS handles the proxy voting for a lot of big investors and funds, and if given the go-ahead can vote things en masse. This, you can be sure, is a cause for concern in the upper suites, and it should be.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/06/12/mylan-begins-harvesting-the-crop-its-sown
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/angry-about-epipen-prices-executive-dont-care-much.html?_r=1
http://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/mylan-investors-rally-votes-against-chairman-coury-and-his-97m-pay-package

Previous Coverage of Mylan and their Practices:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/10/06/021244
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/23/0136202


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday June 14 2017, @03:42PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday June 14 2017, @03:42PM (#525480) Journal

    Oh, I agree the Wall Street problems aren't new either. But I'd also say Wall Street's influence in society broadly has grown significantly. My grandparents didn't own stocks. They bought savings bonds. They had bank accounts that earned interest. They might, if they had some extra money for "investment," have invested in municipal bonds or something.

    Now a lot more people are tied to this "perpetual growth" machine through various investment funds, including significant numbers of "ordinary people" who are often three steps more removed from the process, because they often invest in aggregate funds rather than individual companies. But their investments drive the system and enable it too.

    So I don't disagree with you about history or that the "long game" is generally a better investment option. But volatility comes from somewhere -- and I don't think it's going away, because most people and most investors don't think that way.

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