Mylan chairman to public critics: Flip the bird and go copulate with yourselves!
Mylan knew you would be mad about drug prices—and didn’t care one bit
After public outrage and lawmaker blustering, EpiPens are still really expensive.
BETH MOLE - 6/5/2017, 11:06 AM
Some pharmaceutical companies are troubled by stratospheric drug prices. Several have vowed to limit price hikes, for instance. And the powerful drug lobbying group PhRMA is at least trying to distract consumers’ attention away from price gouging by dangling shiny advertisements about their life-saving research.
But there are some companies that just don’t care. Mylan appears to be one of those.
According to the former employees, who requested anonymity citing nondisclosure agreements and fears of retaliation, Mylan expected outrage over its price hiking ways and planned to simply ignore it. In fact, the former executives revealed that after employees repeatedly warned about the potential for public counterblasts, the company’s chairman, Robert Coury was unmoved.
His response was summarized in this charming passage:
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.
Coury, who received around $160 million in compensation last year from Mylan, declined to discuss the matter.
Though Mylan may be an extreme outlier in the business, others are continuing on with price increases amid the public furor. A financial report from Friday indicated that Pfizer Inc. has ratcheted up the price of nearly a hundred drugs by an average of 20 percent so far this year, Reuters noted.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/mylan-chairman-drug-pricing-critics-ought-to-go-copulate-with-themselves/
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