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Herman Cain Blames Hillary Clinton, Democrats For EpiPen Price Hike

By Shaunee Flowers
Published on: 12:18 PST, Aug 27, 2016

The EpiPen scandal has consumers outraged after Mylan CEO Heather Bresch decided to raise the price of the injectors more than 400 percent. While the EpiPen outrage is real and justified, Herman Cain’s website says there are others who the public should be angry with over this newest pharmaceutical company taking advantage. Cain claims that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are to blame for the EpiPen price hike and that it’s Bresch’s ties to the political party that may keep her out of trouble.

Hillary Clinton was quick to show her outrage over the EpiPen price hike. The Democratic nominee for president recently said that Mylan needed to immediately reduce the price of these lifesaving devices.

In a report posted to Cain TV, it is revealed that Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia). Considering Mylan’s familial ties to the Democratic party, it’s hard to imagine Bresch or anyone else from the pharmaceutical company getting hauled in front of Congress and asked to explain why they decided to just raise the price of the EpiPen out of nowhere when there is no competition to keep prices low.

The report pointed to a Wall Street Journal article outlining how the Food and Drug Administration has made it near impossible for other drug manufacturers to make a generic form of the EpiPen in order to compete with Mylan effectively. Due to their monopoly on the lifesaving drug injector (and not the drug itself), the pharmaceutical company recently was able to raise the price of the EpiPen to more than $500 each, sparking outrage over the huge price hike. Just in 2016, the article cited two major companies, Sanofi and Teva, who applied for FDA approval for their EpiPen generics and were turned down.

Adding insult to injury, soon after the EpiPen scandal broke, news began to circulate that the Mylan CEO also gave herself a $16 million pay raise. While Bresch tried to explain away the price hike and her brand new raise, many have criticized the greedy CEO and have pointed out that this whole EpiPen scandal boils down to nothing more than greed.

“We’re manufacturing the product, distributing the product, enhancing the product, investing,” Bresch explained in a CNBC interview reported by Raw Story. “When we took over this product eight years ago, there was very, very little awareness. We have doubled the lives of patients who are carrying an EpiPen. We have passed legislation in 48 states to allow undesignated EpiPens to be in schools.”

What Bresch failed to explain is how the EpiPen will be available to many of those families in light of the shocking price hike. Many who rely on the lifesaving device in the case of an allergic reaction causing anaphylactic shock have said that they no longer can afford to carry the pen.

Heather Bresch was defended by very few, one of the most notable being the former Turing CEO Martin Shkreli, who also became famous when he decided to hike up the cost of a lifesaving AIDS drug, Daraprim. The cost hike ended up landing Shkreli in hot water and he is still wading through the legal mess that came about with his capitalist price gouging.

Herman Cain ties Hillary Clinton and the Democrats into the EpiPen scandal and other pharmaceutical disasters because of their control over the FDA. Cain’s site blames Democratic regulators for strengthening monopolies and failing to allow competition in markets where that competition would naturally keep prices low for drugs like the EpiPen and Daraprim.

[Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images]

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