EpiPens and government cheese: some things won't change no matter who wins the 2016 election.

AuthorMangu-Ward, Katherine
PositionEditor's Note - Editorial

At the end of August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture bought II million pounds of cheese--that's a cheese cube for every man, woman, and child in America--in order to bail out the nation's feckless cheesemongers.

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Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack touted the aid package, worth $20 million, as a win-win: "This commodity purchase is part of a robust, comprehensive safety net that will help reduce a cheese surplus that is at a 30-year high while, at the same time, moving a high-protein food to the tables of those most in need." (Most of the federal government's new stockpile will go to food banks.)

This bailout of Big Cheese came on top of an $11.2 million infusion earlier in the month to dairy farmers enrolled in a 2014 federal financial aid scheme. The deal comes after months of lobbying by the National Farmers Union, the American Farm Bureau, and the National Milk Producers Federation, who were too antsy to wait for their next big cash cow to come ambling in with the farm bill.

The same week, Sen. Chuck Grassley(R-lowa) wrote a letter to the pharmaceutical company Mylan, demanding an explanation for why EpiPens, the epinephrine auto-injectors that severely allergic people carry in case of an emergency, have quadrupled in price since 2007. Grassley cited constituents paying $500 to fill their prescriptions.

Hillary Clinton issued a statement about the price increases as well: "Since there is no apparent justification in this case, I am calling on Mylan to immediately reduce the price of EpiPens." Donald Trump used the occasion to score points, tweeting out a story about hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation from the disgraced company. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) echoed Clinton's sentiment in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission: Lamenting that "antitrust laws do not prohibit price gouging," she asked the regulatory body to look into whether Mylan has used "unreasonable restraints of trade" to keep prices high.

The summer's cheese bailout and EpiPen price scandal are ideological Rorschach blots. Where one observer sees only the evils of the profit motive, another looks at the same fact pattern and sees the perils of an overweening regulatory state.

Vox sided solidly with the profit shamers, declaring: "We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods...

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