How the pursuit of shareholder value weakened the economy

[stpioc]

We featured Mylan, the maker of the life saving EpiPen earlier in this thread. It's the company that hiked the price of the EpiPen in epic proportions, all the while when top management is raking in vasts amount of money. This is how they respond:

Numerous drug companies have been criticized for the increased prices of some medications in the past few years. According to a new report by The New York Times, the outrage had been a long time coming — Mylan employees were concerned about the price increases in as early as 2014.

At one point, the employees brought it up with Mylan's chairman, Robert Coury. Here's how that went, as reported by Charles Duhigg at The Times:
"Mr. Coury replied that he was untroubled. He raised both his middle fingers and explained, using colorful language, that anyone criticizing Mylan, including its employees, ought to go copulate with themselves. Critics in Congress and on Wall Street, he said, should do the same. And regulators at the Food and Drug Administration? They, too, deserved a round of anatomically challenging self-fulfillment."

How Mylan's chairman responded to EpiPen pricing concerns - Business Insider

And then there is this:

So I was surprised when my pharmacist informed me, months after those floggings and apologies had faded from the headlines, that I would still need to pay $609 for a box of two EpiPens. Didn’t we solve this problem? Not quite.

What’s more, Mylan is back in the news. On Wednesday, regulators said the company had most likely overcharged Medicaid by $1.27 billion for EpiPens. The same day, a group of pension funds announced that they hoped to unseat much of Mylan’s board for “new lows in corporate stewardship,” including paying the chairman $97 million in 2016, more than the salaries of the chief executives at Disney, General Electric and Walmart combined.

Regulators missed an opportunity to reform Mylan in 2012 when the company produced a television commercial showing a mother driving her son to a birthday party and implying that he could eat whatever he wanted, despite his nut allergy, as long as an EpiPen was nearby to counteract a reaction. The commercial also suggested that an EpiPen was a sufficient treatment on its own.

Mylan knew neither of those was true, according to executives from that period. In fact, Mylan had recently started a major lobbying effort to encourage schools to stock EpiPens by arguing that people with serious food allergies are always at risk, and that EpiPens were a necessary supplement to emergency medical treatment.

Before the birthday advertisement aired, the ad went through multiple internal review processes. Mylan executives told Ms. Bresch that the commercial was improper. One employee went so far as to send an internal email saying the advertisement would increase the frequency of allergic reactions, according to a person who saw the correspondence.

Ms. Bresch disagreed. She said it was better to act boldly, according to a former executive who participated in that conversation.

Outcry Over EpiPen Prices Hasn’t Made Them Lower - The New York Times