"REVERSE VOXSPLAINING: DRUGS VS. CHAIRS"

"The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.

If a chair company decided to charge $300 for their chairs, somebody else would set up a woodshop, sell their chairs for $250, and make a killing – and so on until chairs cost normal-chair-prices again. When Mylan decided to sell EpiPens for $300, in any normal system somebody would have made their own EpiPens and sold them for less. It wouldn’t have been hard. Its active ingredient, epinephrine, is off-patent, was being synthesized as early as 1906, and costs about ten cents per EpiPen-load.

Why don’t they? They keep trying, and the FDA keeps refusing to approve them for human use."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/?utm_content=buffer71a03&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

As an EpiPen owner for more than 20 years (though, knock on wood, I've never had to use one) I can tell you that this is having a serious impact on a lot of people.

I'm lucky that I can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on refills (and they expire after a little under a year, so even though I've never used one I have to get new ones every year). But a lot of people aren't so lucky, and some people actually do have life-or-death situations that require them to use one (or even 2 at a time) and then replace them - on top of hospital fees, because EpiPens aren't cures, they are just for the purpose of keeping you alive long enough to get medical help. 

And life with an anaphylactic allergy can be a scary thing. We are threatened by things that other people (at best) don't even notice and quite often seek out and intentionally bring into the environment. Your friends and family will forgot (the number of times people have given me food with secret cashews...), typically safe foods will change their recipes, people will forget to clean knives or pans, and sometimes people will genuinely lie (I've learned that crab at sushi restaurants is ALWAYS fake and is actually some cheap fish that puffs up my lips).

And then sometimes you will have a reaction to something completely out of the blue that wouldn't logically have any of your allergens (like, I think I have an allergy to some kind of very particular cheese mold, and to whatever it is they case vegan sausages in). 

Which is all to say that the Epipen is a non-optional part of my decision to survive this often toxic world, and it needs to be accessible.