After Mellini Kantayya, an actress who lives in Brooklyn, chatted with her Facebook friends in July about the high cost of EpiPens, she knew she had to do something.
A friend in Connecticut, the mother of a child with food allergies, was facing a $600 bill for the product, an injector that delivers a lifesaving dose of epinephrine to reverse severe allergic reactions. She'd also just seen a TV segment, based on an article from the health website STAT, about ambulance crews that couldn't afford EpiPens because the price had surged by more than 500 percent in recent years.
“It just felt nefarious,” said Ms. Kantayya, whose health insurance covers the cost of EpiPens for her husband, who has an allergic condition. “Just because we're not paying for it, we're still paying for it in terms of social cost,” she said. Then she thought, ‘Why don't I do a petition, and maybe something will be done about this.'”
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