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It is not made at all clear if the government is truly granting that monopoly (and if they are, did Mylan bribe the government for that privilege somehow?) or i
by jackmott 10y ago
It is not made at all clear if the government is truly granting that monopoly (and if they are, did Mylan bribe the government for that privilege somehow?) or if the competing products were truly not deemed safe or effective enough. Anyone have expert knowledge in that area?
The rest of the Forbes Articles seems like the usual delusional libertarian nonsense were they point out well known and obvious downsides of regulation while pretending no such downsides exist in deregulated markets
(i.e., poor people would still die, even as prices drop, because some prices can only drop so much, and dangerous drugs brought to market by unscrupulous companies which are always common)
Also I like to remind the HackerNews community, that everything you use every day (transistors, integrated circuits, information theory, communications satellites) were invented in whole or part at a government mandated monopoly (Bell Labs). Of course there were conditions on that mandate, like not patenting what they invented.
- maxerickson 10y agoThere's generic versions of a different auto-injector available, so the monopoly is very narrow, on prescriptions that say "Epipen". Patients can ask their doctor to prescribe Adrenaclick and then choose the generic.
- andrewla 10y agoA serious question -- what do you mean when you say that Bell Labs was a government mandated monopoly? As far as I was aware, it was a privately funded privately owned research laboratory. I'm genuinely curious, not disagreeing, though I am a little dubious. The transistor, at least, was definitely patented, and just a cursory search [1] yields tons of patents involving transistors, so I don't think there was a restriction on patents. And as a minor issue, the IC is generally credited either to TI or Fairchild, depending on what you consider to be a modern integrated circuit; Bell Labs had no significant involvement. [1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=transistor+schockley#hl=en&tbm=pts&q=transistor+shockley https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=transistor+sch...
- rayiner 10y agoIn Bell Labs's heyday, AT&T was a government-sanctioned monopoly. See Part I of Wu's "The Master Switch." The same is true for Xerox PARC. At the time, Xerox was protected from competition by Xerox's printer/copier patents.