The Biden administration on Thursday asserted its authority to seize the patents of certain costly medications in a new push to slash high drug prices and promote more pharmaceutical competition.
The administration unveiled a framework outlining the factors federal agencies should consider in deciding whether to use a controversial policy, known as march-in rights, to break the patents of drugs that were developed with federal funds but are not widely accessible to the public. For the first time, officials can now factor in a medication’s price — a change that could have big implications for drugmakers depending on how the government uses the powers.
“When drug companies won’t sell taxpayer-funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard said during a call with reporters Wednesday.
why shouldn’t we get what we pay for? not for a “reasonable price” out of some sense of “public private partnership”. if the people bear the cost of development the people should own the product outright.
Fuck that. We should be passing laws to reduce all patent periods over time, eventually falling either insanely low or to zero.
This is a good thing.
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Only an idiot thinks we wouldn’t develop drugs without them.
Patents are written into the Constitution and are generally a good thing when enforced as they are written to be. The problem is the system has been so perverted and abused that it’s a joke of what is supposed to be.
What’s wrong with copyright law? It definitely needs to be reformed, in particular the term lengths and the nonsense-laden DMCA. But for the most part, it’s a good thing.
While outside the scope of the article I disagree with the notion patents need to go away. If privately funded, developed, and created a patent incentivizes ingenuity and has it’s place. That said, limits of some sort prevent monopolies/exploitation and are the other side of a healthy system. **If publicly funded in any way the people have a right to it.
I know Lemmy is very anti-corpo and I generally I am too. But for a personal inventor imagine spending years of your life on a project only to have your only way to seek compensation for that work taken away - unless you’re a total saint you would never want to create again (or certainly wouldn’t share it).
The counter point is that if it can save millions of people it certainly seems wrong to withhold it for personal gain, and so there must be a compromise somewhere or that’d make the person evil (which most corporations end up being).
Hehehee, I like to imagine him talking to some of these companies on the phone about this problem and them acting all tough before he made this decision.
“Won’t someone think of the billion dollar drug corporation? They’re the real victims of this abuse of executive power!” - Republicans right now, probably.
“When drug companies won’t sell taxpayer-funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,”
Cue the legal bickering over what counts as “reasonable”. I think the definition is clear: the only reasonable price for medicine is the lowest possible price. And the only way to ensure that is to not award drug patents in the first place (at all, but especially if development was funded by taxpayers).
Fuck yeah Dark Brandon
He does this in time, I won’t feel bad for voting for him just to stop Trump’s immenant objective of Tyrrany of Obvious Lies and Theft.
“You’re killing me”! - Drug Companies “Good” -Me
Drugmakers have argued that seizing the patent for a medication makes that treatment vulnerable to competition, which can reduce a company’s revenue and limit how much it can reinvest into drug development.
Or yknow, maybe spend a few billion less on marketing and TV commercials?
There would be a good governmental oversight: drug companies may no longer advertise their products to the public. I don’t think anyone has ever seen a drug commercial in a positive light; if the drug was effective and worked well you wouldn’t need to advertise it.
“Seize” is a really weird term to apply to something that only exists as an idea. Especially an idea that only has meaning because governments actively enforce it. It would make more sense to say Biden plans to end enforcement of the relevant patents.
It seems like the language of the article is designed to paint Biden’s plan in a bad light.
Good. I’m tired of being taken advantage of by a corporate oligarchy that endlessly enriches itself at our expense.
I’m probably going to get downvoted for this, but the Biden administration has really exceeded my expectations.
No disagreements here. I am kind of shocked by this very non neolib behavior—the above as well as well as being the first sitting president to join the UAW picket line. I was a bit miffed about the train strike, though. But his administration lobbied the companies and got them their sick days they’ve been fighting for, for ages. Really didn’t expect any of that.
Non neolib? Introducing competition rather than seizing and making them public is about as neolib as you can get.
So by letting a company keep their monopoly due to federally subsidized patent thus harming citizens but helping the company is… less neolib?
Whatever it is, it seems shittier than making a move to fuck a company – if it results in reduced drug prices anyway.
Where did I say they should be allowed to keep their monopoly?
It really annoys me when they Biden has done nothing.
Then they’re all, “well I didn’t hear about it”
I get that the media and even the Dems suck at showing people what they’ve accomplished, but that doesn’t mean they’ve done nothing.
This isn’t an action. This is words. Words are wind.
They do great work, but they don’t market and promote their successes well enough. I would prefer a society that favors humility more and therefore appreciate this administration’s style, but it seems that a lack of hubris is now considered a fault in the public eye, on both sides of the aisle.
I would like an administration whose flamboyant about their successes so I know what to expect in my daily life when it comes to politics aka why I see more EVs (rebates funding and a federal charging grid), lower/higher prices on things (like Biden removing patents to create competition) and even insurrectionists going to jail (if we had a working justice system)!
Wake me up when any of this shit is actually implemented.
This is already something though. It’s a legal threat.
We will only see patents actually be seized if the drug companies don’t play ball. They’ll have to choose whether to cooperate or to challenge this in the courts. The govdrnment isn’t trying to seize patents anymore than banks are hoping to repossess property.
I’ll give credit when things have changed a single smidge.
Yes it seems like most of these actions are symbolic gestures that never pan out into actual change. Like asking for marijuana to be ‘studied’ to see if it belongs as Schedule 1 with no medical value while 38 states have approved it for medical use and 24 states have legalized it for recreational use. What the fuck is left to study at this point?
Another example is him pardoning people with federal marijuana possession convictions even though nobody was actually incarcerated for simple possession in the federal prison system.
Seems this shit is all about generating headlines and political brownie points not actually improving anything in our day to day lives.
You get it. I wish the rest of these Lemmys did, too.
This sounds like highway robbery. If the government wants patent rights for things they funded, they should include those terms in the grants and not do it after the fact.
Cope and seethe.
taxpayers have spent tens of billions of dollars to fund hundreds of drugs
That’s actually not that much per drug - approximately 100 million, when the average drug costs over a billion to bring to market. I think the drug companies may have a point when they say
“The Administration is sending us back to a time when government research sat on a shelf, not benefitting anyone.”
On the other hand
The drugmakers charge more than $150,000 a year for Xtandi in the U.S. before insurance and other rebates, but charge a fraction of that price in other developed countries.
I don’t think it’s fair for Americans to subsidize the healthcare of equally wealthy people in other countries. There’s a possible win-win situation in which the US government helps protect the interests of American drug companies abroad in exchange for lower domestic prices.
protect the interests of American drug companies abroad
That’s a nice sentiment, but the drug companies are voluntarily selling internationally at lower prices. There’s no “protecting the interests” drone strike we can make when the big pharma is doing the rate setting itself (negotiating, true, but still a voluntary choice). The proper fix would be to mandate that any drug that had any Federal research may not be sold in the US for more than in any other part of the world and that fee may not exceed (make up a number) 10x the production cost, with distribution not allowed to exceed 50% of the cost of the retail price of the medication and delivery not to exceed 125% of commercial shipping rates.
The USA can do quite a lot via trade deals, but what you’re suggesting actually goes a lot further than what I had in mind to force other countries to pay more for drugs rather than simply reaping the benefits of American spending. Since the majority of drug profits come from the USA, drug companies would drop low-paying foreign markets rather than reduce American prices. This would simply lock out poor countries that can’t pay more than they do (maybe you would make an exception for them) but as long as the USA also enforced treaties protecting American patents, wealthy Europeans would have little choice except to pay their fair share.
(I think actually doing all that would be a major international-relations blowup, with a lot of retaliation by countries exporting to the USA. I’m also not sure it would be legal in the context of existing treaties. But it would get the job done…)
Other countries dont need to pay more for drugs. Pharma companies are taking advantage of Americans, having tax dollars fund research and then chsrging exorbitant prices to those same taxpayers.
Anything but
metricuniversal healthcare.“Best we can offer is a Republican created plan to offer insurance outside of employment and an additional tax if you don’t/can’t participate in it.” ~Democrats
– to make it less offensive to the Republicans and a handful of “moderate” Democrats so it stood a chance of actually becoming law. It didn’t even pass in its original form due to a Republican led filibuster: the Bill’s backers didn’t have the votes to overcome it, so they had to make concessions. Unfortunately that’s how Congress works.
The idea Democrats could have passed a bill for universal healthcare is absurd. Any serious attempt to pass it would have been shut down. The parties aren’t homogeneous entities: they’re made up of individuals with their own agendas.
I think you may be white washing what occurred at the time. Obama made concessions to appeal to Republicans but they weren’t needed to pass the bill and none of them even voted for it in the end (apart from 1 House Republican). Democrats had a super majority at the time with 60 senate seats.
Best we can do is… [check notes]…
Fine you.
