US: Senate urges FTC to launch antitrust probe of Mylan

The US Senate Judiciary Committee urged federal antitrust regulators on Monday to launch a probe into whether EpiPen maker Mylan broke the law by preventing schools from purchasing competing allergy treatments.

The bipartisan request to the Federal Trade Commission by Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy comes just a few weeks before the committee is slated to convene a hearing to scrutinize a pending $465 million settlement that Mylan has said will resolve claims it underpaid rebates to state and federal Medicaid programs.

“Due to the dramatic increase of the price of drugs across the board, the FTC should be vigilant in its scrutiny of this market,” the lawmakers wrote.

In a statement emailed to Reuters, a Mylan spokeswoman defended the company’s ‘EpiPen4Schools’ program, saying it has no purchase requirement for schools to participate and that it offers schools four free EpiPens per calendar year also without purchase restrictions.

Previously, schools that wished to purchase additional EpiPens could do so in some cases with a discount and a “limited purchase restriction,” but no such restriction remains in place today, she added.

Full Content: CNBC

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