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.
I’m probably going to get downvoted for this, but the Biden administration has really exceeded my expectations.
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 think that’s more the media’s fault than the administration’s.
American citizens slammed with lower drug and education costs
–there, now the media can run with it lol
SLAM! As an American I demand more slams! Slam everything! Slam Trump! Slam Biden! Slam medicare! Slam insurance policies! Slam portmanteaus! Slam Bidenomics! Slam Obama care!
SLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMM!!!
Good news doesn’t get views.
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)!
No, I feel the same way. It’s just that they’ve also utterly sucked in some areas too. Regardless, you know I’m hella voting for him because wtf else am I gonna do? There’s no choice in our political system so I’ll do what I need to.
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?
So by letting a company keep their monopoly due to federally subsidized patent thus harming citizens but helping the company is… less neolib?
Yes. Monopolization is one of the many externalities that government exists to address within a neoliberal framework
Neoliberalism is a good thing, actually.
Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?
It’s only controversial if your only understanding of economic orthodoxy is Breadtube or some shit lol
Every time there’s a bunch of commenters talking about how little they like Biden (or his administration) for ‘not doing enough’, I know:
- that person almost certainly does not actually vote
- that person does not pay attention to politics, they just repeat what they’ve seen on social media, which is their own echo chamber.
How do I know they don’t vote? Because they are too lazy to even be up to date via Google on the political opinions they post - they certainly aren’t going to bother to actually leave their house and vote.
That said, the Biden administration might do well to be more bombastic with their statements about their successes. I don’t love the idea that the merit of a success would need to be ‘sold’, but you have the GOP screaming idiot things all over the media sphere every single day, and that has to be competed with.
The only point of disagreement I have is that it’s been demonstrated that the Internet doesn’t promote echo chambers, it does quite the opposite in fact.
The problem it introduces is that people are constantly exposed against their will to opposing viewpoints curated to make them as angry as possible.
This results in them becoming explosively volatile towards those opposing viewpoints even in moderated or even well justified forms because they have learned to associate any opposing opinions with the algorithm selected ultra aggro version they just had a knock down drag out hundred comment chain argument with someone a day ago.
IRL you just disregard the fucker and move on, the internet is teaching people to see everyone who disagrees with you as that fucker laying in wait to instigate yet another knock down drag out argument where you feel like you’re losing your mind talking to a wall that insists the sky is orange and that climate policy is communism because soylent green burgers or whatever.
Then there’s the additional problem of when a significant portion of the people trying to sound reasonable on the internet turn out to actually be that fucker out to instigate because they want to make you look crazy for how mad you get at their bullshit while they calmly explain that “it isn’t unreasonable to expect a politician to earn your vote!”
It’s rhetorical strategies within rhetorical strategies all designed to keep you under a constant feeling of being attacked.
It’s also possible they are not legally allowed to vote in the US for one or another reason…
That’s what I keep saying. Despite the bar being extremely low due to the previous administration and the whole “nothing fundamentally will change” my expectations have definitely been exceeded
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I’m not sure brainwashing is the right way to go here idk 🤔
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We don’t need a Fox “news” equivalent for Democrats that pumps out propaganda (your term used above) and traps Democrats into an echo chamber.
I mean we already have some fairly biased left leaning news outlets. Nothing like Fox or OANN or Breitbart.
Still, I would like to get rid of heavily biased propaganda outlets because – yes – they basically brainwash their listers with various techniques.
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They do, it’s just that that ecosystem is owned by the same vested interests and so it churns a cacaphony of criticism aimed at making the left feel no accomplishment is good enough and no effort is far enough.
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Democrats are not left.
I slightly agree. But more that nothing has been done yet aside from clarifying vague wording in legislation.
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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.
why is everything not different 6 hours after a policy is enacted???
You, right now.
I’ve seen this again and again with younger people in particular (though I’ve also seen the occasional boomer behave similarly). It’s like people have no concept of how long things can take in the real world sometimes.
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.
Drug commercials are illegal everywhere in the world except the U.S. and New Zealand.
Moved from US to Canada and its honestly so nice not seeing or hearing ads for zoflam or whatever CONSTANTLY. You don’t realize how much it’s shoved in your face until it isn’t anymore
I eat the butterfly pills
limit how much it can reinvest into drug development.
Also, the taxpayers are the ones who funded the drug development in the first place!
Um, not to mention this is specifically regarding TAXPAYER FUNDED drugs. We paid for them and they’re price gouging and preventing people from getting access to them. It’s so incredibly wrong.
So their argument is that they can’t make enough money on their government subsidized drug development. Yeah ok, corpos, get fucked.
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.
I like how that’s supposed to be a compelling argument against it, “But if we open it up to competition someone else will do it cheaper and better than us and we’ll go out of business.” Good! Fuck your company lol.
Also the taxpayers are funding the development, which is why the government can do this. If the public pays for it, they should be able to access it as far as I’m concerned.
That would all be fine if they alone bore the cost for all that R&D. Clearly, thats not the case and they want to socialize the development and privatize the fruits of that development, in which case they are consequently invited to non-negotiably+kindly pound salt and go fuck themselves.
Or even better, ban prescription drug ads like nearly every other country (only the U.S. and New Zealand allow it).
Maybe they could get more government funded money if they sold it at reasonable prices and kept coming out with new government funded drugs?
Does anyone really see those ads then go to a DOCTOR and ask about it? Maybe I’m in the extreme minority here but I don’t have money burning a hole in my pocket to go to a doctor and if I do I want to spend the absolute least as possible
I’ve often thought that this is a perfect situation in which to invoke Eminent Domain.
If the government can decide what my home is worth, and force me to sell it at that price so that they can sell it to a developer to tear down and build something else to sell to someone else, then why can’t they decide what a patent is worth and force the patent holder to sell it at that price.
The patent holder should be compensated for whatever they paid to develop the technology. Obviously, if the patent is based on government funded research, then whatever the government already paid would be deducted from the value of the patent.
If they are doing their R&D documentation correctly, the US tax code already allows for tax credits up to certain limits. In a lot of cases, it covers nearly 100% of qualified R&D coats.
Counterpoint: They took government money, the public *already" owns those drugs (in part).
If a private investor had fronted half the money for the company, they’d own half the company. The government’s role here is angel investor, and it’s insane to let these companies buy out their partner at the initial investment price. It’s my opinion that if the US government is the majority owner of any given medication, it is in the best interest of the public that those medications be made available at cost.
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More consumer protections please
But who are going to protect the poor CEOs?
Fuck yeah Dark Brandon
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).
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.
Not sure if it applies here, but I remember reading something years ago about how more patents now are either “Product Patents” (mainly used in Developed countries) vs “Process Patents” (used more in Developing countries). A Product patent protects the end result, no matter how it gets made, whereas Process patents just protect the way that it’s made and don’t forbid anyone from making the end result, they just can’t make it the same way.
Product patents almost seemed designed to stifle innovation, since it prevents anybody else from coming up with a more efficient method for creating the thing, whereas Process patents still allow for others to get into the market and come up with better/cheaper ways of making the thing.
It might be hard to protect Drugs though, since probably the bulk of the resources spent on it is going to be all that up-front research that needs to be done, then manufacturing it is probably trivial in alot of cases. Maybe there could be something done where all drugs that get Government-funding are available to anyone to produce, but anyone outside of the patent-holder that produces them must pay some sort of small “licensing fee” for the right to produce them (for X years), otherwise no one else is prevented from producing/selling the drugs. Just something that could help keep drug companies from going overboard with their insane pricing schemes, but still allows them to recoup the money they put into research.
“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.
Anything but
metricuniversal healthcare.“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).
With the R’s and D’s history of both being completely owned by the same oligarchs in mind, this sounds like a framework that will be used to crush smaller pharmaceutical companies and give patents to the all ready huge ones… I might just be super critical, correct me if I’m wrong…
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
