In August of 2016, NBC News Business Unit reporter Ben Popken was scouring the internet for story ideas. He stumbled upon a Reddit thread about the rising cost of EpiPens. Popken knew this was a growing concern among the three million Americans suffering from severe allergy attacks who rely on the life-saving drug to keep them from going into anaphylactic shock. We had already reported on the rising costs on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt earlier that summer. But Popken got to thinking about all the kids who need EpiPens. He’d been given an assignment to find a back-to-school story that went beyond the typical run on big box stores for school supplies. He thought maybe he’d found it. Popken knew the EpiPen expired every year. Wouldn’t this be an unexpected back-to-school cost for millions of parents?
Popken started calling pediatricians. Had they been hearing complaints from parents about the price of EpiPens? The response was overwhelming. Doctors described the outrage and panic families were experiencing when they got the bill. Popken knew he had a story. EpiPens had been rising in price ever since Mylan had acquired it in 2007, going from $90 to more than $600. But this latest price hike happened at a time when insurance companies were shifting more of the cost to patients, and as millions of moms and dads were heading to the pharmacy to pick up new EpiPens for the new school year.
It was the perfect storm. NBC News was the first media outlet to connect these dots, and Popken’s piece on NBC News.com spread like wildfire: 500k page views, a Facebook reach of 3.2 million. Dozens of other media companies from The New York Times to The Huffington Post picked up our reporting. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted it. Our little story on a hidden cost of going back-to-school had struck a national nerve. Here at NBC News, we marshalled all our resources to continue to set the editorial agenda on the EpiPen story. Our reporting not only dominated the headlines on The Today Show, Nightly News, MSNBC, CNBC and NBCNews.com, but across the country as well.
Our stories generated a flood of comments from broadcast viewers and digital readers. One woman told us, “For Mylan to be the sole producer of this product and hold my life, and the millions of children and adult lives hostage for profit, is extortion and an outrage.” Eight days after our original story was published, Mylan broke under the public pressure. CEO Heather Bresch appeared live on CNBC to defend the $600 price tag, saying it covered the cost of the auto injector device and product improvements. But we didn’t buy it. We spent the next several weeks interviewing auto-injector manufacturers, doctors, patients, and former Mylan employees about Mylan’s practices and reported our findings. Our stories ultimately led the House Oversight Committee to call top Mylan executives to Washington to testify before Congress about the EpiPen price gouging.