Lock Them ALL Up*

How many times will you hear crap coming out of your Tee Vee and various reps and senators before you drop everything you're doing, get off your ass, show up in DC and refuse to leave until everyone involved in this garbage goes to prison?

The EpiPen isn’t new; it has been in use since 1977. Research and development costs were recouped long ago. Nine years ago, it was bought by the pharmaceutical company Mylan, which then began to sell the device. When Mylan bought it, EpiPens cost about $57 each. Few competitors existed, and for various reasons, that has remained the case. The device actually worked and saved lives. People needed it. Mylan raised the price. It also began to raise awareness.

"Raise the price" is sure a decent description... if you consider a 500% increase a "raise"...

Why?

No competition.

Or is there?

Yes, there is. You can buy these over the counter virtually anywhere in Europe for about $20 each. You can buy insulin over the counter in France for about the same price for a month's worth of supply.

And yet if you bring just one of either back over said border with you then you are breaking the law. Bring a whole suitcase back and you're going to prison.

Yet if you did exactly that, were not put in prison and sold them, how many $600 (for a pack of two) pens would be sold in America? Zero, because even if you charged $50 each (a $30, or 150% profit) you could make a hell of a business out of flying back and forth between any EU country and the United States doing exactly this.

How long would Mylan sell them for $300 each ($600 for a 2-pack) if you started doing this? 15 seconds, which is how long it would take them to figure out that they'd sell zero of them if they didn't drop the price back to about $50.

Now note very carefully that absent government force it is blatantly illegal under 15 USC, with a ten year per count felony prison term, to attempt to monopolize, restrain trade or price-fix. Therefore it is only because of the explicit, intentional and outrageous conduct of your own government that you are getting raped like this on a literal daily basis, and this issue, as I've repeatedly pointed out is not limited to EpiPens -- in fact, Mylan has raised prices on dozens of off-patent, generic medications by about the same 500% in the last few years and the only reason they get away with any of it is the above use of government force.

Note that while the law may prohibit you from bringing said things back from Europe under penalty of imprisonment nowhere in that same law does it exempt the makers from 15 United States Code -- in other words, said law and regulation prohibiting your reimportation doesn't grant them an exemption to 15 USC prohibiting restraint of trade or pricing-fixing. If that law were ever to be enforced those executives would still go to prison and their firms would still be bankrupted by ruinous fines, in short.

That is exactly where they, and all of Congress, damn well ought to be facing right here, right now.

If you want to know why medical care is so expensive and you need the fraud called "insurance", if you want to know why Obamacare was "sold" to people and is now going to collapse, if you want to know why Medicare and Medicaid were sold as "necessary" and yet continue to bankrupt the nation the answer is right here.

You are paying roughly five times what virtually everything ought to cost when it comes to medicine, and the reason you are paying it is because every firm and person in the business either is wantonly violating the law (and nobody ever gets indicted or goes to prison despite doing so) or even worse they've conspired with the government so they can enforce what is an otherwise-illegal act of restraint of trade under penalty of throwing your ass in jail instead of theirs and yet the're still quite-arguably violating the law themselves!

Let me know when you're ready to cut the crap, America, because until you do en-masse and descend on Washington DC to demand and enforce that this garbage stop right here and now, with every one of the co-conspirators drawing 20+ years of hard felony federal time along with each and every one of the involved firms being dismantled from the millions of dollars of fines per count, with each person harmed being a separate count, you deserve to be screwed, blued, tattooed and finally dead as you continue, each and every day, to give your consent to exactly that.