part of what you're paying for with your drugs is quality control to ensure that you 1) made what you wanted to make 2) didn't contaminate it with something you didn't want.
You should take a look at the documents I FOIAd from FDA (the parts they didn't redact that is--apparently my appeal will take 3 years to be processed). Median Medical Technologies, Inc. (a Pfizer company that produces and owns patents for the EpiPen) violated numerous safety rules and breached aseptic manufacturing multiple times, and did not appropriately investigate failures.
Here's one of their violation letters, I was told that sanctions were still being considered for the latest inspection.
i don't know what else mylan makes, or how much is epipens, or whatever, but if we look at their 2017 financials, and removed all R&D, they'd have had a profit of ~1.2B on total revenue of ~11.9B. so they could shave an average of 10% off the cost of their product line and still break even.
What % was spent on revenue; a while back it came out that drug companies were spending more on marketing than on R&D whilst arguing they needed special protections because of the high cost of R&D.
A low profit company, charging a distant lower amount for probably rely on word-of-mouth + news features to some extent.
Also, you can save a lot by not paying shareholders and C-suiters massive amounts.
You might be interested to read a bit about the history of people's attempts to bring EpiPen competitors to market in the first part of this blog post [0]. I don't see how it being non-profit would make much of a difference in this case.
