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The EpiPen Shakedown

By Geoffrey Norman

There are times when it seems the entire objective of Washington and the political class is to shake down the rest of us for as much as can be had. Hillary Clinton would not be paid six figures for speaking if she were just an ordinary citizen on the lecture circuit. We’ve all heard her speak and know how much we would pay as the price of admission to listen to one of the talks that she gave to Goldman Sachs. Most real people would just as soon head down to the barber shop and watch haircuts.

Then, there is Harry Reid who has spent most of his life running for political office or doing all he could to maintain his grasp on one. He is, of course, a wealthy man.

And now we have the Manchin family. The patriarch is a U.S. senator from West Virginia. His daughter is temporarily in the spotlight as CEO of a pharmaceutical company that seems to have been engaged in the kind of price gouging that fires Bernie Sanders’ jets.

The story, which continues to develop, is that Manchin’s company found itself with a nice little monopoly on the device known as the EpiPen, which as you can read here, is

… a standard, and standby, emergency treatment for people experiencing severe allergic reaction to, among other things, bee stings and in danger of dying from anaphylactic shock. The device saves lives, which is, manifestly, a good thing. Not so good, however, is the fact that the company that makes the EpiPen—Mylan, it is called—enjoys a kind of Washington-enforced monopoly, thanks to the FDA’s failure to approve competing devices (the drug itself is generic; the spring-loaded needle in the “pen” that injects it is a device requiring FDA approval). The company spent some $4 million lobbying Congress on something called the “School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act.” And, finally, with its monopoly secure, the company raised the price of the product by some 400 percent.

So, Heather Manchin was summoned to Washington where she faced hostile questions about the price of the EpiPen and the size of her compensation. Which runs a cool $18 million.

Now, we learn from USA Today, that the thing was truly a family business. Seems that after Heather’s mother

… Gayle Manchin took over the National Association of State Boards of Education in 2012, she spearheaded an unprecedented effort that encouraged states to require schools to purchase medical devices that fight life-threatening allergic reactions. The association’s move helped pave the way for Mylan Specialty, maker of EpiPens, to develop a near monopoly in school nurses’ offices. Eleven states drafted laws requiring epinephrine auto-injectors. Nearly every other state recommended schools stock them after what the White House called the “EpiPen Law” in 2013 gave funding preference to those that did.

And how, you ask, did Gayle Manchin come to be in charge of that Association? Well, it seems she

… was appointed in 2007 to serve a nine-year term on the West Virginia board of education by her husband, then-Gov. and now Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. Gayle Manchin became the association president in January 2012, the same month her daughter became Mylan’s CEO.

In her testimony House Oversight Committee, Heather Manchin deplored the way her mother had been dragged into things, saying

“While people may want to criticize Mylan for giving away free pens … I thought it was a very cheap shot to bring my mother into this.

It does seem so … unfair.

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