Spectator: Scratch a “conservative” defender of the pharmaceutical industry on the topic of drug prices, and you’ll generally hear an argument formulated something like the following:
“High drug prices are just the free market at work. Who are we to judge how much a piece of life-saving technology is worth?”
Were the market for drugs truly free and competition open, this line of reasoning would be hard to argue with, at least from the Right. However, as anyone with a basic understanding of pharma’s abuse of the patent system, or of the anti-competitive ban on drug importation, or any of a number of other policies will tell you, nothing of the sort is true. If anything, high drug prices are a result of specific government policy: something that decisively argues against the notion that the market for drugs is in any way free.
But fortunately, after this week, it just might get closer to being free. That’s because this week, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) will take the first step to curtail drug prices using the very thing that big pharma fears most: competition. Specifically, Lee is going to introduce a bill that takes square aim at pharma’s capacity to shut generic drugs out of the marketplace: something that has been integral to its anticompetitive business model for eons.
To explain the bill, known as the Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act, a quick thought experiment is necessary: Imagine that you wanted to open a hamburger joint. However, the only way you could get a recipe for the sandwich was for your would-be restaurant to pass a health inspection conducted not by the government but by the head of McDonald’s.
If the GOP can actually bring down drug costs it will set the dems back a decade.
I’m in the Pharma industry, a realizing is coming and it is well deserved.
Should have said “reckoning”, damn auto correct!
Well, how would the bill balance the magic of competition with a company trying to recoup its years of trial and error and investments through a patent that protects their formula from people who will just look at their work and copy it and sell it at a discount without the financial risk it took in R&D?
@stop2think — I’d love to upload a college paper I did on the drug patent rip off, but it’s on a long-dead hard drive. Most drug patents are the result of years of studies and trials conducted (in the U.S.) by public institutions like the U. of Washington, for example. Leroy Hood (another example) made his breakthrough work on the genome at UW at the expense of taxpayers, who build all the buildings and supply all the equipment and pay all the salaries of the people, including Hood, to do their work. Hood, as a member of the NIH, then oversees who receives the patents from the resulting work. As far as I could tell, the universities do not receive any payback for these patents and the public pays for both the research, disoveries and exorbitant prices for the patented meds/devices. In the case of Hood, he also was a primary stockholder in the company who bought the patent(s) of some of the work from the genome. I’m fuzzy now on the details. It’s been at least 25 years since I did the research for that paper.
For fucks sake, where the fuck is the generic insulin!!!! Do you know how expensive insulin is???
@stop2think – I think the trade off would probably be less Govt regulation and hoop jumping to bring down the R&D costs to bring a drug to market. Either that and/or perhaps they get a fee/royalty paid straight up from a company looking to produce the drug themselves.
But I agree with JustAl. If the GOP can tackle a few of the Dems “crown jewels”, especially when it comes to drug and health costs and bring them down, the Dems will be reeling worse off than they are now.
Why are SO MANY people (children-seniors) on prescription meds?
But…never underestimate the dems penchant for jumping in front of the parades d taking credit for something popular, while the republicans just stand there with their dicks in their hands.
Stop2think, you want me to believe that competition is good in every industry except for healthcare. OK – Show me.
@anonymous — Yours is the real question, my friend. I’ve been to peoples’ homes with the plastic container — the one with each day of the week compartmentalized — containing a pharmacopia of their week’s drug requirements. This one for high blood pressure, that one for blood thinners, another one for cholesterol and several others. Then you look at the patient and he/she is at least 50 lbs overweight and inactive. Now, I’m not saying that certain drugs aren’t necessary for a better quality of life (I’m taking OTC meds for an auto-immunity problem, without which my life would be miserable), but most people don’t now, for example, that a $25.00 per pill prescription for candidiasis is a mask for an underlying condition which can be cured by eliminating sugar from the diet, or that so many diseases can be cured or managed through diet and exercise. It will be very interesting to see what else they find about the overuse of Ritalin.
“The money’s in the treatment; not in the cure.”
A (I thought) rather cynical statement from a guy I knew in medicine.
I don’t know Pharma-stuff, but I’m pretty damned sure that if the gov’t’s involved, it’s fucked up – whatever it is. The purpose of gov’t intervention is to ensure the fortunes of the politicians and the politically-connected, as opposed to the politically-unconnected (that is, those who donate largely vs those who don’t).
izlamo delenda est …
Restless Leg Syndrome…
They invented that after inventing a drug that induces
semi-paralysis in the lower extremities.
Drug companies perpetuate their patents by a process called “evergreening”. By combining drugs or altering the delivery system you can come up with a $600 epipen or a $500 inhaler containing drugs that were patented in the 1960s.
“as far as I can tell universities do not receive payback…” stop right there Abigail. The Universities receive royalties and they are substantial and if they don’t then the formula is considered “in the public domain” and can’t be patented.
‘college paper” indeed.