Business // Outside the Boardroom

Of course EpiPens cost $300

When you choose free market health care, don't be surprised what it will cost

Charging $300 for an EpiPen makes perfect sense in the health care world we live in.

In our free-market system, you can charge whatever you want for your product. A hospital can charge $50 for an aspirin, or $53 for a pair of latex gloves. You can even charge a family $15,000 a year for health insurance.

If you don't have insurance and need emergency care, however, don't be surprised if the hospital charges you 10 times the actual cost of treating you. That's because you didn't negotiate the prices in advance the way insurance companies do.

Supply and demand rules our capitalist world. If there are tens of thousands of people who could die if exposed to an allergen, and you sell the only emergency device that can save their lives, then why not raise the price 550 percent? Especially if you've made the wise move of hiring a U.S. senator's daughter as CEO, which should provide you some political cover.

If you want to start talking about the perversity of our health care system, this is an interesting place to start. Though I would ask what has taken you so long to join the fun. Oh, I know why. Because it was always sick people on the margins of society who got price-gouged, not towheaded elementary school children in the suburbs.

When I started working in Africa in the 1990s, the big scandal was the cost of HIV drugs. The prices were too high for most Africans to afford, and U.S. drug companies refused to offer discounts on the continent hardest hit by the disease. That tune changed only after drug companies in India and Brazil began violating the patents and providing the drugs at their actual cost to manufacture, which is just pennies per pill.

That didn't stop Martin Shkreli, though, from trying to price-gouge American HIV patients just last year.

Or consider the plight of the 16.8 percent of Texans who don't have health insurance because they are too poor for Obamacare, but don't qualify for Texas Medicaid. When they go to the emergency room, they know that it won't be long until the debt collectors come looking for them and keeping them in poverty for the rest of their lives.

Or what about the insurance companies that cut a deal with one hospital, and then refused to do business with the only other one, hoping it will go out of business and set up a monopoly? That was resolved only after my colleague Jenny Deam reported on it.

Trying to rein in the abuses inherent in our for-profit, free-market health care system is a game of whack-a-mole. Pharmaceutical companies, insurers, doctors and hospitals are always looking for a way to boost profits, and they will get away with it until there is public outrage.

What we need is outrage over how our system currently operates. Americans spend twice as much money on their health care than people in other developed countries, yet more babies die at birth, our people are more ill, and we die younger. Our system makes lots of millionaires, but it doesn't make us healthy.

Sure, get angry about a $300 EpiPen. But don't get angry about a $30 trillion health care system that should only cost $15 trillion, because we prefer corporate bureaucrats rationing our health care. Besides, a government-run single-payer system, which works in every other wealthy country, is labelled socialized medicine by those with the most to lose.

Everybody loves capitalism, at least until we get sick, and we come face-to-face with its logical conclusion.