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You're talking about different things. Foodstuffs can and should be regulated to a reasonable degree, and they are regulated, not only by the FDA but also by st
by cookiecaper 10y ago
You're talking about different things. Foodstuffs can and should be regulated to a reasonable degree, and they are regulated, not only by the FDA but also by state departments of agriculture and local departments of health. Whether an early iteration of Soylent should've been legal or not is beside the point.
The point is that, iirc, Mylan has a government-granted monopoly on the EpiPen via a patent for the injection mechanism. That means Mylan is the only company that is legally allowed to manufacture it in the United States. In addition, it takes millions of dollars to bring a treatment through the slow FDA approval process (though it's not clear if this is necessary to compete with EpiPen), so even if someone was somehow able to circumvent and/or license any patents Mylan may hold, it'd still take herculean resources to bring a competitor to market.
That's what the grandparent is talking about. The EpiPen can be so expensive because no one else is legally allowed to sell a substantially similar device without Mylan's permission. When the consumer has only one option, especially for something as crucial as a life-saving medication, things are really bad, whether the economic system that consumer is living under calls itself "capitalism" or something else.
We've got to fix our intellectual property laws, both patent and copyright. A large part of the Fortune 500 is only there because of the excessive legal monopolies that we've granted through intellectual property (which means it'll be basically impossible to fix).
- ceejayoz 10y ago> The point is that, iirc, Mylan has a government-granted monopoly on the EpiPen via a patent for the injection mechanism. No, they don't. The EpiPen's patent is long expired. https://www.google.com/patents/US4031893 https://www.google.com/patents/US4031893
- cookiecaper 10y agoI know that some patents on the device have expired. However, there still seems to be frequent reference to Mylan's current eligibility for patent protection. Here's one such reference from a New York Times editorial, published today [0]: >Today that same tiny, lifesaving bolus of epinephrine — used mostly to treat severe allergic reactions — is delivered via sometimes elaborate devices called auto-injectors. Though the medicine itself hasn’t changed, the delivery devices have been protected by patents, enabling drug makers to charge ever escalating — sometimes prohibitive — prices for one of the oldest drugs in medical use. It doesn't say which patents specifically may cover the EpiPen, but as far as I can tell, the consensus is that the device is patent protected. I would love to know if there's definitive evidence either way -- specifically which patents Mylan claims to be protected under, or whether this is in reality just a common assumption/myth. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/the-lesson-of-epipens-why-drug-prices-spike-again-and-again.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/the-lesson-...