Bizarro Land: Mylan CEO Blames Deductibles for Epipen Price Hikes

Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, former lobbyist and daughter of US Senator Joe Machin, wants you to get more ‘engaged’ to help solve the ‘health care crisis’ now plaguing this nation. Please explain this to me, again like I’m a moron baby. How does the system make her hike prices on Epipen by 461%? Isn’t Mylan and others like it the core problem with the system? If the drugs weren’t so god damned expensive, then the healthcare insurance wouldn’t be so fucking high, no? This isn’t a chicken v the egg debate. Mylan is God and made both the chicken and the egg. Don’t tell me the hikes are used to fuel r&d, while their profits are through the roof and CEO compensation has reached AROD levels

“The system incentivizes higher prices,” Mylan CEO Heather Bresch told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday.

The price of EpiPens, a lifesaving medication and delivery system for people with severe allergies, has increased more than 400 percent in the past decade.
The price hikes have gotten national scrutiny. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called the increases “outrageous,” saying they put “profits ahead of patients.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has written Mylan asking how EpiPen’s prices were determined.

“No one’s more frustrated than me,” Bresch said. “My frustration is, the list price is $608. There is a system. I laid out that there are four or five hands that the product touches, and companies that it goes through before it ever gets to that patient at the counter. Everyone should be frustrated. I’m hoping that this is an inflection point for this country.”

Mylan responded on Thursday by expanding already existing programs for patients who are facing higher out-of-pocket costs.
“Congress and the leaders of this country need to quit putting their toe in this topic and really fix this — we have an outdated system.”

The company is reducing the cost of EpiPens through the use of a savings card that will cover up to $300 for the EpiPen 2-Pak. Patients who were previously paying the full price for the EpiPen will have their out-of-pocket cost cut by 50 percent. Mylan also is doubling the eligibility for its patient assistance program.

But Bresch said to do that, she had to go “around the system,” and that drug list prices were only part of the problem causing a health-care crisis in the U.S.
“Congress and the leaders of this country need to quit putting their toe in this topic and really fix this — we have an outdated system,” Bresch said. “The patient is paying twice.”

She also called on patients to “get engaged” with their health care.

“People don’t understand their coverage — and how could they? It’s complicated,” she said. “This isn’t a Mylan issue. This is a health-care issue.”

Shares of MYL are up 2.7% on this news.

Dominic Konstam, analyst from Deutsche Bank, has no fucking idea what the hell is going on with productivity. It could be IT robber baron chicanery, or some sort of cancerous fuckery plaguing end user demand. All he knows, frankly, is this shit is really bad.

This one made me laugh out loud.

“It’s a rigged, disgusting, system.”

With a 95% unfavorable rating amongst black Americans, Trump is trying to force feed them the red pill. They’ve been sucking on the blue one for several decades now– and to no avail, frankly.

Well, at least someone is cognizant enough to question the fuckery. It’s typical to hear intelligent men, like Mohammed Apabhai, accept brazen market rigging as an acceptable form of central bank policy. These people are drunk at the punch bowl, with their cocks stuck in glory holes, as Yellen, Kuroda and Draghi perform fellatio on an industrial scale.

I am very sorry for that midnight imagery. But some of you need to swallow the red pill and be woken the fuck up.

What exactly is the US Navy trying to accomplish with their peevish and beta-male approach to dealing with the Iranians. Last year they permitted sailors to be placed under arrest, their fucking boats taken, and dignity destroyed. Now they’re ordering a fucking Destroyer to tuck tail and run from a few peasant Iranian speed boats. Literally.

This is the USS Nitze during a training excersize.

And this is what they did when four asshole terror boats came within 300 yards of them, ‘at a high rate of speed’, in the Straits of Hormuz.

The U.S. defense official said that in Tuesday’s incident the USS Nitze tried to communicate with the Iranian vessels 12 times, but received no response. It also fired 10 flares in the direction of two of the Iranian vessels.

“The Iranian high rate of closure… created a dangerous, harassing situation that could have led to further escalation, including additional defensive measures by Nitze,” the official said.

USS Nitze had to change course in order to distance itself from the Iranian vessels, the official said, adding that the incident could have led to a diplomatic protest, but the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran.

An official, speaking under the protection of anonymity–for reasons inexplicable to me– said the Iranian moves were “unsafe and unprofessional.”

My one question is WHY IS THIS OFFICIAL SCARED TO PUT HIS NAME TO A STATEMENT LIKE THAT?

This is fantastic for navy morale.

As you were.

Doomed. Before you know it, robots will takeover the blogging industry and scores of unemployed ‘citizen journalists’ will hit the streets, in a scornful rage against the internet overlords who destroyed their millstone.

I cannot be more disappointed by this advancement in technology. I understand how Uber and asshole companies like nuTonomy want higher profit margins; but this is egregious. Think about what these assholes just did. They launched a ‘cool’ and hip livery service that was connected by a GPS app. They lured thousands of yellow cab and black car drivers to their ranks, which in turn fueled their growth, which in turn gave them the metrics to raise more capital and to scale their business globally. Like Saturn eating his son, they’re now turning on their own employees and attempting to replace them with autonomous driving cars.

A small company beat out Uber as first to market with this horseshit, by a matter of a week or so. Uber is slated to unveil their soon to be crashing into brick wall cars in Pittsburgh in a few weeks.

The service will start small — six cars now, growing to a dozen by the end of the year. The ultimate goal, say nuTonomy officials, is to have a fully self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018, which will help sharply cut the number of cars on Singapore’s congested roads. Eventually, the model could be adopted in cities around the world, nuTonomy says.

For now, the taxis only will run in a 2.5-square-mile business and residential district called “one-north,” and pick-ups and drop-offs will be limited to specified locations. And riders must have an invitation from nuTonomy to use the service. The company says dozens have signed up for the launch, and it plans to expand that list to thousands of people within a few months.

The cars — modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electrics — have a driver in front who is prepared to take back the wheel and a researcher in back who watches the car’s computers. Each car is fitted with six sets of Lidar — a detection system that uses lasers to operate like radar — including one that constantly spins on the roof. There are also two cameras on the dashboard to scan for obstacles and detect changes in traffic lights.

The testing time-frame is open-ended, said nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma. Eventually, riders may start paying for the service, and more pick-up and drop-off points will be added. NuTonomy also is working on testing similar taxi services in other Asian cities as well as in the U.S. and Europe, but he wouldn’t say when.

“I don’t expect there to be a time where we say, ‘We’ve learned enough,'” Iagnemma said.
Doug Parker, nuTonomy’s chief operating officer, said autonomous taxis could ultimately reduce the number of cars on Singapore’s roads from 900,000 to 300,000.

“When you are able to take that many cars off the road, it creates a lot of possibilities. You can create smaller roads, you can create much smaller car parks,” Parker said. “I think it will change how people interact with the city going forward.”

Good thing Obama is lenient and generous with his welfare programs. There will be scores of unemployed cab drivers and employees of livery car services in need of it soon.

The parallels of what Farage did in the UK, getting his country to get the hell out of the EU, and what Trump is trying to accomplish by pushing against the globalist elite, cannot go unnoticed.

It’s only natural to see Farage at a Trump rally, talking greasy against the H and the thin man in the White House.

Before Heather Bresch became CEO of Mylan, she was a lobbyist for the company. I am sure her success as a lobbyist and role as CEO at Mylan had nothing to do with the fact that her Dad is Senator Manchin, democrat asshole from W. Virginia.

In an indescribable conference dated a few weeks ago, the company blamed employers for choosing high deductible plans for the ‘noise’ around the 460%+ price hike for the Epipen, a life saving allergy drug. They also called the product inexpensive. Fuckery, largess.

With respect to EpiPen, revenues were driven by net price favorability, due in part to payer pricing dynamics year over year, as well as strong sales volumes in anticipation of the peak season. We began realizing the benefits of customer contract negotiations over the last several quarters. I’d note that year-over-year comps will continue to evolve until we pass the one-year mark of the Auvi-Q recall.

But this point, I think there has been a lot of discussion and some headlines around patients going from paying a copay to now paying the entire cost of a product. And where EpiPen falls, because if you look on an annual basis, as a life-saving drug, to have a WAC [Wholesaler Acquisition Cost] price at just under $600, I think that you can see it falls as not an expensive product. And so when employers through high-deductible plans that were incentivized to increase high-deductible plans through Obamacare, as people — as employers shift more cost to employees and make that everything’s got to come out of pocket before you hit your deductible is where you’re seeing a lot of noise around EpiPen.

And so again, I think as far as us realizing those margins are sustainable as we work ourselves through these contracts. And if the dynamic around the EpiPen market would ever change, those would change as well. But I think what we’re continuing to benefit now is the realization of those.

I think as I said earlier in my remarks, we don’t have a significant concentration from anyone product or business segment at Mylan today. And as we continue to grow, just as now we’re bringing Meda into the fold, EpiPen from a true dollar contribution will just continue to shrink. So again, there’s no over-reliance on EpiPen as a brand.

Let’s recap.

The Third Estate, a garrulous class of people, have been complaining over the 460% increase in the cost of the Epipen and is the core problem here, not the fact that the price itself has no business or merit being this high. Moreover, if it wasn’t for those pesky employers, choosing high deductible Obamacare plans, none of this ‘noise’ would be present now. Tax payers would be paying Mylan’s bills like the good little slaves they are, and corrupt lobbyists like Heather Manchin would continue to ingratiate themselves with elaborate pay hikes, unabated, in order to finance 300 foot yachts and summering in Nantucket.

Shares of MYL are down another 5.4% today.  They deserve to get smoked.

As you were.

How’s that for a title?

I sold short FCX on August the 1st and it is my sole position, alongside my long term thesis trade in TLT.

Thus far, I am up a little more than 10% on the FCX short, and more than 18% on my TLT long.

Shares of Freeport are getting smoked today, off by more than 7%.

FCX is a proxy for China, period, end of story. The stock has risen greatly over the past 3 months and there isn’t anything woeful about markets trading near record highs. Having said that, once the market breaks down and starts drowning people again, rest assured, FCX will lead to the downside. It is the toxic blend of everything that’s wrong with the market. It’s an over leveraged, debt laden, China reliant, piece of shit.

I will cover my short when markets flag oversold.

I will sell TLT when the yield curve inverts.

Until then, I’ll continue to talk shit and try my best to guide the readers of this site into safe havens and follow a credo to do no harm.

Perhaps this new technology can be used to form a kill list in the future. God only knows how much I despise gossipers. Perhaps we can round up and kill all those who like Kanye West articles? It’d be a good start.

At any rate, one has to wonder how much longer these social networks, who claim to be apolitical, can get away with this shit. Everything you do online leaves a footprint. Every page you like, subscription added, and comment left is both monitored and added to an algorithm that is then used to target you or used for ads.

For the love of gigantic walls paid for by Mexico, why the fuck do people keep putting personal info on these platforms?

The primary purpose of these platforms isn’t for fun and entertainment. They are overtly used by the government to monitor and control its citizens.