Sarah Jessica Parker attends the 2016 PEN America Literary Gala. Credit: J. Countess/Getty Images 
 
 Sarah Jessica Parker has cut ties with Mylan, the manufacturer of EpiPen, a portable injector that can stop a life-threatening allergic reaction. Her reason: The company has steadily increased the price for a pack of two from around $100 in 2007 to more than $600 in recent years, a hike of more than 400 percent. 
 
 “I’m left disappointed, saddened and deeply concerned by Mylan’s actions,” the former Sex and the City star, 51, wrote in an Instagram post on Thursday, August 25. “I do not condone this decision and I have ended my relationship with Mylan as a direct result of it.” 
 
 She continued, “I hope they will seriously reconsider the outpouring of voices of those millions of people who are dependent on the device, and take swift action to lower the cost to be more affordable for whom it is a life-saving necessity.” 
 
 A photo posted by SJP (@sarahjessicaparker) on Aug 25, 2016 at 4:02am PDT 
 
 According to The New York Times, Mylan has imposed two 15 percent increases a year for the past few years. 
 
 
 
 Parker had been a paid spokesperson for Mylan in May and spoke to Us Weekly about her 13-year-old son James Wilkie’s life-threatening peanut allergy and revealed that he carried two EpiPens. In the interview, Parker told Us she was surprised to learn that 43 million Americans are at risk for anaphylaxis, and every six minutes, food allergy reactions send someone to the emergency room. 
 
 
 
 Meanwhile, the Emmy winner isn’t the only famous face taking aim at Mylan. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton released a statement on Wednesday, August 24, in which she called the price hikes “outrageous, and just the latest example of a company taking advantage of its consumers.” 
 
 “It’s wrong when drug companies put profits ahead of patients, raising prices without justifying the value behind them,” Clinton, 68, said. 
 
 On Thursday, Mylan announced the company will be offering coupons covering up to $300 “for patients in health plans who face higher out-of-pocket costs.” 
 
 “As a mother, I can assure you, the last thing that we would ever want is no one to have their EpiPen due to price,” Mylan CEO Heather Bresch said in an interview with CNBC Thursday. “Our response has been to take that immediate action making sure everyone has an EpiPen.” 
 
 Bresch defended the price hike by pointing to the marketing and distribution costs of EpiPens. 
 
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 / Updated By Ben Popken 
 
 The cost of saving your child's life has gotten a lot more expensive. 
 
 Parents getting ready for back-to-school season have another item to toss in the basket along with Trapper Keepers and boxes of pencils — and they're facing sticker shock at the latest price increase. 
 
 Doctors and patients say the Mylan pharmaceutical company has jacked up the prices for an EpiPen — the portable device that can stop a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction — from around $100 in 2008 to $500 and up today. 
 
 That's a hike of over 400 percent. 
 
 Mylan didn't invent the EpiPen, it acquired it in 2007, getting a drug that had been approved since 1987 and had 90 percent market dominance. Nor does it manufacture the EpiPen itself. Mylan buys it from a wholly owned Pfizer subsidiary for $34.50 per pen. 
 
 Then in 2009, Mylan launched an upgraded device. A medical device technology expert and a doctor who took apart the "before" and "after" versions of the EpiPen found that despite safety and graphics upgrades, the auto-injectors shared a similar "core." 
 
 Now former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has weighed in, calling the Mylan company "vultures." 
 
 U.S. Senators are scrutinizing the price hikes, with one calling for an FTC probe. Connecticut Senator Richard Bluemnthal, who pushed for emergency epinephrine to be stocked in public schools, pledged Friday to investigate the "shocking increase." 
 
 UPDATE: On 9/21/16, the House Oversight Committee grilled Mylan and the FDA in a hearing on the EpiPen price hike. 
 
 "Patients are calling and saying they can't afford it," said Dr. Douglas McMahon, an allergy specialist in Maplewood, Minnesota. "They're between a rock and a hard place." 
 
 Following a recall by Mylan's chief competitor last year, the company now enjoys a near monopoly. 
 
 Because of aggressive marketing and branding campaigns, and lobbying for legislation that requires the product to be stocked in schools, they have a brand dominance equal to that of Kleenex, doctors say. 
 
 About the size of a fat marker, they are carried by many parents of kids with severe allergies wherever they go — ready to jam the gizmo into their child's thigh to deliver epinephrine and stop anaphylactic shock from a potentially fatal bee sting or bit of peanut. 
 
 An EpiPen. Carlos Osorio / AP file 
 
 And because they have a stated expiration date of one year, parents refill them annually, incurring an additional co-pay each time. 
 
 Tracy Bush, a 42-year-old mom and food allergy consultant, never goes anywhere without two EpiPens on her. Her son, age 14, carries another. She began doing so after he was diagnosed with severe allergies as a 2-year-old. 
 
 For the past 10 years, she has watched the price she paid for her refills rise higher and higher with no discernible improvement to the device or medicine. 
 
 In 2008, Bush said the price was $145.99. In 2010, it was $220.99, then jumped to $649.99. This year her pre-insurance costs were $1,118.08. 
 
 Despite the hikes, Bush was glad to have the device two years ago when her son had a bad reaction while eating some watermelon. 
 
 "He said it felt like a potato chip was caught in his throat. Then he got a look of terror on his face. His voice was totally different, it sounded like he had sucked helium. I was like 'Oh my goodness, I'm going to have to use an EpiPen,'" she said. "I will never forget the look that I saw." 
 
 In a statement, Mylan said that the prices have "changed over time to better reflect important product features and the value the product provides," and that "we've made a significant investment to support the device over the past years." 
 
 The company also offers coupons on its website that can reduce costs. This year, for the first time, Bush was able to use those coupons and her "good" insurance plan to bring down her out-of-pocket costs to zero. But not everyone can do the same. 
 
 "When epinephrine only costs a few cents, but they're going up to $500, personally I don't think that's ethically responsible," said Dr. McMahon. 
 
 And he understands better than most what costs are involved: For the past few years he's been developing his own, smaller version of the EpiPen, and trying to get it approved by the FDA and bring it to market. He estimates that process costs about $1.5 million. In 2015, Mylan's profits from the sale of EpiPens rose to $1.2 billion. 
 
 McMahon says his device will retail for about $50. 
 
 Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the former presidential contender and a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, told NBC News in a statement: 
 
 "The drug industry's greed knows no bounds. There's no reason an EpiPen, which costs Mylan just a few dollars to make, should cost families more than $600. The only explanation for Mylan raising the price by six times since 2009 is that the company values profits more than the lives of millions of Americans." ||||| Photo Illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images 
 
 After drawing public wrath and congressional scrutiny over its decision to raise the price of life-saving EpiPens to about $600 a pack, Mylan is trying to save its image. On Thursday the pharmaceutical company announced it would give a $300 coupon to lower- and middle-income customers who have to pay for the device out of pocket because they lack health coverage or have a high-deductible insurance plan (previously, it offered a $100 discount card). Meanwhile, CEO Heather Bresch appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box to try to quell some of the outrage by laying blame for the price hike at the feet of our “broken” health care system. 
 
 
 
 Jordan Weissmann Jordan Weissmann is Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent. 
 
 It was not an especially convincing performance. 
 
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 Before we get into Bresch's interview, a word about the coupon. Even at half price, EpiPens—which stop allergic reactions by injecting epinephrine into users—are still far more costly today than a few years ago. (Full disclosure: I carry one myself). When Mylan purchased the device in 2007, a pack cost about $100. Giving patients a 50 percent break after increasing prices 500 percent is not exactly a sweeping act of charity, even if it does help some families erase their entire co-pays. It's also worth noting that this latest move is very much in Mylan's own self-interest. Pharmaceutical companies don't typically make their profits off of middle-income patients who have to choose between gas money and their kids' allergy meds; rather, they count on big payments from insurers, who pass it on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Obscuring the true cost of drugs from the public through discounts and donations is part of the game pharma manufacturers play to avoid accidentally causing an uproar of the sort Mylan has witlessly stumbled into—which is to say, Bresch and her fellow executives were negligent in not offering that coupon sooner. 
 
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 And now about that CNBC spot. Mylan's main talking point seems to be that journalists have erred by focusing on the EpiPen's list price of $608 per pack. In reality, few patients actually pay that cost, the company notes, because they are either insured or receive a discount. Meanwhile, Mylan itself only makes about $274 on each sale—the rest goes to other companies in the drug supply chain, including wholesalers, pharmacies, and pharmacy benefit managers. It even put together a handy flow chart for PR purposes. 
 
 Mylan Pharmaceuticals 
 
 
 
 Bresch echoed this point in her interview with CNBC's Brian Sullivan. But then things got a bit weird, as the CEO declared that she too was outraged by the high cost of America's prescription drugs. 
 
 Mylan CEO to CNBC on EpiPen controversy: "No one is more frustrated than I am." https://t.co/kEGDc8L0oU pic.twitter.com/IC81mplgUv — CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) August 25, 2016 
 
 Brian Sullivan: But surely you must understand the outrage. Somebody I talked to last night said people are outraged because it seems outrageous. That the American Medical Association has said this is basically the same product it was in 2009. And yet the price has gone up 3 or 400 fold. 
 
 Heather Bresch: Look, no one’s more frustrated than me. I’ve been in this business for 25 years… 
 
 Sullivan: But you’re the one raising the price, how can you be frustrated? 
 
 Bresch: My frustration is there’s a list price of $608. There is a system. I laid out that there are four or five hands that the product touches and companies that it goes through before it ever gets to that patient at the counter. No one, everybody should be frustrated, I am hoping that this is an inflection point for this country. Our health care is in a crisis. It’s no different than the mortgage and financial crisis back in 2007. This bubble is going to burst. 
 
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 This would all make more sense—and feel less hollow—if Mylan were not actually profiting from its price increases. In that case, it could fairly argue that leechlike middlemen were pushing up costs while allowing manufacturers to take the blame. And, to be sure, there is some of that going on. As the New York Times notes, Mylan upped EpiPen list prices by about 30 percent in 2015, yet didn't record any additional revenue. That suggests pharmacy benefit managers—which deal with prescription drugs for insurers and other clients—managed to negotiate some fairly large discounts. But make no mistake, Mylan has cashed in. Per the Times: 
 
 In other years, though, sales of EpiPen rose by larger amounts and Mylan seemed to have retained about half the extra revenue that would be expected from its list price increases and prescription growth, according to Umer Raffat, an analyst at Evercore ISI. Even in 2015, he said, the rebates were kept by insurers and pharmacy benefit managers, and were not seen in lower prices paid by consumers. 
 
 “Someone definitely got that,” Mr. Raffat said of the rebates. “Who is that? It wasn’t passed on to customers.” 
 
 If you want to boil it down even further, think of it this way: Mylan is crying that it only gets to keep $274 each time someone buys an EpiPen pack. That's still nearly three times the list price when it acquired the product. 
 
 So, I am sure Bresch truly is frustrated by the fact that Mylan is taking most of the heat for price increases when other companies are profiting from them, too. But that doesn't excuse her company's own role. As the Times reports, the manufacturer appeared to be increasing the EpiPen's price to squeeze a few last inflated profits from the product before a generic competitor landed on the market. In a twist, though, the Food and Drug Administration rejected the generic, and the EpiPen's one major alternative was pulled from pharmacies due to reliability issues, leaving Mylan with an unexpected monopoly that it is now profiting from. Is it the company’s fault the government nixed its big new competitor? No. But nobody forced Mylan to jack up prices for one last big sales push.
– It's the size of a marker and as common as Band-Aids in a school nurse's office. EpiPen, a device that delivers a dose of epinephrine that can stop an extreme allergic reaction, has been credited with saving the lives of children for whom a peanut or a bee sting could be fatal. But drugmaker Mylan has hiked the price of the device by nearly 500% over the past few years, CBS News reports, and parents and doctors aren't happy. "When epinephrine only costs a few cents, but they're going up to $500, personally I don't think that's ethically responsible," allergy specialist Dr. Douglas McMahon told NBC News. “Patients are calling and saying they can't afford it.” (McMahon is seeking FDA approval for his own device that he says will cost $50.) Twice in her seven years, Ellie Henegar’s life was saved with an EpiPen, but her parents were stunned last year when the bill came to $600, they told CBS. Compare that to 2009, when the bill was about $100 for the same two-pack of EpiPen. While insurance covers varying degrees of the cost, not everyone is lucky enough to have a plan that does, NBC notes. With a near monopoly, Mylan has little incentive to cut the price, Bloomberg reports. In fact, Mylan execs considered dumping the aging product in 2007. Instead, they launched a marketing campaign that turned the device into an essential, donating EpiPens to schools and dropping $35 million on TV ads. A law passed by Congress in 2013 requiring schools to stock epinephrine devices also boosted sales, which last year totaled $1 billion. Mylan contends it has made a "significant investment" to improve the device and offers coupons. "It's a totally established brand name with little competition," Bloomberg’s Robert Langreth tells CBS. "That gives them freedom to raise the price every year."