Teva Pharmaceutical, which once responded to price-fixing allegations with ‘polite f-u’ letters’ now doesn't have the cash flow to pay off $4.2 billion of debt that matures in 2021.
Refinancing maturities is not usually a big deal but Teva and Mylan and Heritage Pharmaceuticals became the poster children for Big Pharma arrogance - even though they are all genetic companies, and were somehow wrapped in an ethical halo compared to their original product predecessors.
They have been accused of price fixing, and you might think that is not possible because they are generic drug companies - the products were all created by scientists at other companies and are now off-patent - but current FDA regulations are so onerous that only the largest companies can afford to put even a generic into the approval process. FDA treats almost everything like it's a new drug or device. It is hard to create a generic competitor even though no new work has to be done, because modern FDA regulations have doubled the cost for approval. in the last 15 years.
There is nothing special about Mylan's EpiPen, for example, scientists have known how epinephrine and needles work for a century, and if they simultaneously pay to hype worry about anaphylaxis and get groups to call for an Epi-Pen in every business and even get politicians to force insurance companies to pay for the pens while raising their price 400 percent, another company should be able to just make another version, but it is not that simple. They had one competitor and when they ran into a manufacturing issue FDA was forcing them to go through the entire process as if it was a new invention. They got out of the business instead of enduring all that cost.
In general, generic companies are the sleazes of pharmaceuticals, not the Big Pharma groups who are unfairly lumped in with them. In the US generics have 85 percent of the market and engage in lots of questionable behavior (opiods are the infinity liability Teva now faces) but they still somehow get the ethical halo companies that actually create new drugs are denied.
EpiPen did eventually get a new competitor, which they branded a geneic version of a product that was already generic: Teva Pharmaceuticals, which had been sued by Mylan in 2009 over it.
But by 2014 they were all friends again and banding together to obstruct a probe into price-fixing allegations.
That is not the behavior of ethical companies, but it is the behavior of way too many generic drug ones.
