Aug 25, 2016 3 min read

You may recall, perhaps with a large measure of disgust, Martin Shkreli, who last year as head of Turning Pharmaceuticals raised the price of AIDS drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent to $750 a pill.

He did so because he could, and because he was untroubled by any kind of conscience.

You might think that negative public reaction to Shkreli would discourage drug companies from inflating prices without reason, but you would be wrong. Apparently, his badboy business behavior is admired, and Mylan Pharmaceuticals is emulating him.

Mylan has a virtual monopoly on epinephrine injectors, the emergency medicine for severe allergic reactions to food and bug bites. The corporation with headquarters at Southpointe has hiked the price of its EpiPens as frequently as three times a year over the past nine years, lifting the list price for a package of two pens from less that $100 to more than $600.

Mylan states that the majority of insured patients get the EpiPens at no cost, and that it offers coupons for $100 off on the devices. So if most insured people are not paying any more for the injectors, what’s the big deal?

Although many users of EpiPens are paying no more out of pocket, their insurance companies sure are, and as pharmaceutical companies like Mylan jack up their prices, so go the rates charged for health insurance. And that is indeed a big deal.

Last year, according to IMS Health, 3.6 million prescriptions for two-packs of EpiPens were filled, earning Mylan $1.7 billion. You may wonder where the increased profit from the price increases over the past nine years has gone. It has certainly not all gone to research and development of new drugs.

Heather Bresch was president of Mylan in 2007 when the company purchased the medicines from Merck and the increases began. She has since become its chief executive. According to filings from the company, as reported by the New York Daily News, Bresch’s salary increased from $2,453,456 to $18,931,068 over those nine years.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that Bresch, “hit on the idea of using old-fashioned marketing in part to boost sales among concerned parents of children with allergies.”

Bloomberg also noted that the devices are sold in France for $85, though that may change because Mylan is buying the company that offers them for less.

Price gouging isn’t the only thing Bresch has done to boost Mylan’s bottom line. The company recently renounced its U.S. tax citizenship through a tax-code provision known as inversion, and although its physical headquarters are in Southpointe, it is now based in the Netherlands, where it pays a lower corporate tax.

“Even before Mylan renounced its U.S. citizenship, it was hardly a model taxpayer,” wrote Matt Gardner on the Tax Justice blog. “A 2014 Citizens for Tax Justice analysis found that Mylan had 40 tax haven subsidiaries, from Bermuda to Switzerland, and was holding $310 million in profits offshore for tax purposes – income on which the company may have paid little or no tax to any country.”

We should have a sense of pride in that a global pharmaceutical giant has its headquarters right here in Washington County.

Instead, we feel embarrassed.