11 ms·

White House warns it might break patents of high-priced drugs

76 points by qclibre22 3y ago

beaeglebeach 3y ago
This is a much better plan than their prior plan of pursuing parallel frivelous felony charges against the players of the game who legally raise prices (Shkreli).
- vibrio 3y ago
  Shkreli wasn’t convicted on raising drug prices. He was running multiple organizations and was using left-pocket right-pocket accounting to fund one organization with the investor funds from the other. That iwas not legit and illegal.
  - beaeglebeach 3y ago
    I'm sure the fact the government suddenly was interested in a guy who made his investors gobs of money, none of whom approached as victims (although did testify they would invest again) was absolutely totally unrelated to the fact they prosecuted him in close chronology to the price debacle. When the state finds it's target, they're not bothered they find an unrelated technicality to really punish something else. What they clearly were actually punishing was legal behavior raising price.
    - vibrio 3y ago
      Very clearly. Thanks for sharing.
junofan 3y ago
The administration neglects to mention that the march-in rights are subject to judicial review. Here’s Birch Bayh and Bob Dole clarifying that the march-in rights in the Bayh-Dole Act do not grant the White House this authority based on price: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/04/11/our-law-helps-patients-get-new-drugs-sooner/d814d22a-6e63-4f06-8da3-d9698552fa24/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/04/11/o... The risk capital funding drug development can go elsewhere. If you break the spreadsheet math of drug development, you won’t get cheaper drugs. You just won’t get drugs. Why break the only system in the world consistently delivering 30–40 new drugs year after year?
- throwaway-blaze 3y ago
  The divide in US (and I suspect elsewhere) politics is not Left v Right, it's Stasis vs Dynamism. In this case the "progressives" are proposing a plan that will cause Stasis or even decline...
  - sheepshear 3y ago
    Doing nothing (stasis) has resulted in lower affordability (decline). Your framing is equally valid and incomplete because it's not a binary choice.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  Because absolute opinions on this are stupid. For every cutting edge cancer treatment we get, there’s another pharma company abusing their position to overprice specific drugs. Since the free market explicitly can’t rectify the situation (patents grant artificial monopolies, sick people have very little option to shop around) there should be some system to review and police the worst abuses. One can argue about whether this type of political review is the best, or if we should have a more structured approach (I would like that, tell Congress.) But just shouting that the current system is perfect and should be unrestricted is also a bad approach.
  - beaeglebeach 3y ago
    There is nothing free market about enforcing patent on parties that aren't signatory to it, nor the high regulatory impositions that choke out those who aren't suitably connected to regulatory capture apparatus.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  Almost all of the research for these drugs was funded by taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars are increasingly used to pay for early rounds of safety trials. Private capital now only pays for the late-round efficacy trials, which is the last step before commercial sales. So we'll still get the drugs. We'd just have fewer rich pharma bros with multiple condos and yachts.
bko 3y ago
I think patent reform is a great way to get to lower drug prices but this means an update to objective rules. Selective enforcement and playing favorites by wagging your finger telling execs to be nice doesn't work. Not only does it not work but it invites corruption and political targeting. Having govt dictate price (ie price controls) aren't a new idea and have failed time and time again
- advisedwang 3y ago
  It is essentially impossible for the Democrats to pass serious drug patent reform. Even if the senate Republicans don't filibuster just to prevent Democrats from appearing effective, there's enough Democrats that don't support it that it would be dead. I'd much rather spotting and dodgy executive action than nothing.
  - notadev 3y ago
    Couldn’t you just say not enough Democrats support it without somewhere interweaving blame on Republicans?
    - smileysteve 3y ago
      You could, but that would be less precise. * Doesn't have enough votes in congress, even though 95% of a single caucus that makes up 50% supports it because 10% of votes have to come from another caucus. If 49% votes consistently binary; and another party has 5% on a gradient depending on policy; and 60% of consensus + executive signing is required then no, you can't ignore the issue of having 2 parties.
    - stonogo 3y ago
      The people who would vote against it share the blame for it not happening. Some of those people are Republicans. So, no.
      - ubiquitysc 3y ago
        Not just some, most
mrandish 3y ago
The relevant part of the article: > The administration did not immediately release details about how the process will work and how it will deem a drug costly enough to act. White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted. > There will be a 60-day public comment period. If the plan is enacted, drugmakers are almost certain to challenge it in court. It isn't even the role of the executive branch to address this area. It's the job of the legislative branch (ie actual patent reform). Thus, this announcement is election year posturing which will not result in meaningful change. It's not even a real threat toward pharma corps because they already know it's toothless and it's dishonest from the white house because they know the pharmas know this. The entire point of patents is to create a limited-time monopoly which increases profits. The key to less costly drugs is real patent reform that increases free market price competition paired with streamlining onerous FDA regulations making it faster, less costly and less uncertain to develop new drugs. Pharmas are by far the largest political lobbyists/donors. They wouldn't keep spending all that money in Washington if it didn't work, thus the lack of any meaningful political lobbying reform is an upstream enabler of this problem. Legislative term limits would also help.
- jfengel 3y ago
  Even before partisanship made Congress functionally useless, they were deferring a lot of rule-making power to executive branch agencies. That was a reasonable thing to do. There are only a few hundred Congresspeople; they have neither the time nor the expertise to determine every detail of every regulation. So they set up agencies that are supposed to hire experts to provide those details. The Patent Office is one of those agencies, and that gives the Executive Branch a fair bit of power to nudge the rules without Congress' help. It would be great if Congress weren't fundamentally useless, but it's just not the case, and so government governs with what power it has. That comes down to a billion details by a billion different players (most notably the 800 pound SCOTUS gorilla). But it is entirely possible that the Patent Office could say, "See this rule here? Turns out we shouldn't have granted you that patent in the first place." That is very much a power they have. They'd rather not do it that way. It's bad policy. So they're starting gently, by pointing to what weight they do have to throw around, and hoping that the pharma execs do the right thing. It might even work; we've already seen similar effects bring down the price of insulin (even if it's still three times the price of any first-world country). It would be even better if Congress were to sit down and write decent legislation instead. But my unicorn and I won't be holding our breaths on that.
thenerdhead 3y ago
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/0cdd88059165eef3bed1fc587a0fd68a/aspe-drug-price-tracking-brief.pdf https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/0cdd88059... Jeeze some of these are crazy. The notable one I was aware of was Paxlovid.

76 points by qclibre22 3y ago

This is a much better plan than their prior plan of pursuing parallel frivelous felony charges against the players of the game who legally raise prices (Shkreli).

vibrio 3y ago
Shkreli wasn’t convicted on raising drug prices. He was running multiple organizations and was using left-pocket right-pocket accounting to fund one organization with the investor funds from the other. That iwas not legit and illegal.
- beaeglebeach 3y ago
  I'm sure the fact the government suddenly was interested in a guy who made his investors gobs of money, none of whom approached as victims (although did testify they would invest again) was absolutely totally unrelated to the fact they prosecuted him in close chronology to the price debacle. When the state finds it's target, they're not bothered they find an unrelated technicality to really punish something else. What they clearly were actually punishing was legal behavior raising price.
  - vibrio 3y ago
    Very clearly. Thanks for sharing.

junofan 3y ago

The administration neglects to mention that the march-in rights are subject to judicial review. Here’s Birch Bayh and Bob Dole clarifying that the march-in rights in the Bayh-Dole Act do not grant the White House this authority based on price: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/04/11/our-law-helps-patients-get-new-drugs-sooner/d814d22a-6e63-4f06-8da3-d9698552fa24/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/04/11/o... The risk capital funding drug development can go elsewhere. If you break the spreadsheet math of drug development, you won’t get cheaper drugs. You just won’t get drugs. Why break the only system in the world consistently delivering 30–40 new drugs year after year?

throwaway-blaze 3y ago
The divide in US (and I suspect elsewhere) politics is not Left v Right, it's Stasis vs Dynamism. In this case the "progressives" are proposing a plan that will cause Stasis or even decline...
- sheepshear 3y ago
  Doing nothing (stasis) has resulted in lower affordability (decline). Your framing is equally valid and incomplete because it's not a binary choice.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
Because absolute opinions on this are stupid. For every cutting edge cancer treatment we get, there’s another pharma company abusing their position to overprice specific drugs. Since the free market explicitly can’t rectify the situation (patents grant artificial monopolies, sick people have very little option to shop around) there should be some system to review and police the worst abuses. One can argue about whether this type of political review is the best, or if we should have a more structured approach (I would like that, tell Congress.) But just shouting that the current system is perfect and should be unrestricted is also a bad approach.
- beaeglebeach 3y ago
  There is nothing free market about enforcing patent on parties that aren't signatory to it, nor the high regulatory impositions that choke out those who aren't suitably connected to regulatory capture apparatus.
gamblor956 3y ago
Almost all of the research for these drugs was funded by taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars are increasingly used to pay for early rounds of safety trials. Private capital now only pays for the late-round efficacy trials, which is the last step before commercial sales. So we'll still get the drugs. We'd just have fewer rich pharma bros with multiple condos and yachts.

bko 3y ago

I think patent reform is a great way to get to lower drug prices but this means an update to objective rules. Selective enforcement and playing favorites by wagging your finger telling execs to be nice doesn't work. Not only does it not work but it invites corruption and political targeting. Having govt dictate price (ie price controls) aren't a new idea and have failed time and time again

advisedwang 3y ago
It is essentially impossible for the Democrats to pass serious drug patent reform. Even if the senate Republicans don't filibuster just to prevent Democrats from appearing effective, there's enough Democrats that don't support it that it would be dead. I'd much rather spotting and dodgy executive action than nothing.
- notadev 3y ago
  Couldn’t you just say not enough Democrats support it without somewhere interweaving blame on Republicans?
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    You could, but that would be less precise. * Doesn't have enough votes in congress, even though 95% of a single caucus that makes up 50% supports it because 10% of votes have to come from another caucus. If 49% votes consistently binary; and another party has 5% on a gradient depending on policy; and 60% of consensus + executive signing is required then no, you can't ignore the issue of having 2 parties.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    The people who would vote against it share the blame for it not happening. Some of those people are Republicans. So, no.
    - ubiquitysc 3y ago
      Not just some, most

mrandish 3y ago

The relevant part of the article: > The administration did not immediately release details about how the process will work and how it will deem a drug costly enough to act. White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted. > There will be a 60-day public comment period. If the plan is enacted, drugmakers are almost certain to challenge it in court. It isn't even the role of the executive branch to address this area. It's the job of the legislative branch (ie actual patent reform). Thus, this announcement is election year posturing which will not result in meaningful change. It's not even a real threat toward pharma corps because they already know it's toothless and it's dishonest from the white house because they know the pharmas know this. The entire point of patents is to create a limited-time monopoly which increases profits. The key to less costly drugs is real patent reform that increases free market price competition paired with streamlining onerous FDA regulations making it faster, less costly and less uncertain to develop new drugs. Pharmas are by far the largest political lobbyists/donors. They wouldn't keep spending all that money in Washington if it didn't work, thus the lack of any meaningful political lobbying reform is an upstream enabler of this problem. Legislative term limits would also help.

jfengel 3y ago
Even before partisanship made Congress functionally useless, they were deferring a lot of rule-making power to executive branch agencies. That was a reasonable thing to do. There are only a few hundred Congresspeople; they have neither the time nor the expertise to determine every detail of every regulation. So they set up agencies that are supposed to hire experts to provide those details. The Patent Office is one of those agencies, and that gives the Executive Branch a fair bit of power to nudge the rules without Congress' help. It would be great if Congress weren't fundamentally useless, but it's just not the case, and so government governs with what power it has. That comes down to a billion details by a billion different players (most notably the 800 pound SCOTUS gorilla). But it is entirely possible that the Patent Office could say, "See this rule here? Turns out we shouldn't have granted you that patent in the first place." That is very much a power they have. They'd rather not do it that way. It's bad policy. So they're starting gently, by pointing to what weight they do have to throw around, and hoping that the pharma execs do the right thing. It might even work; we've already seen similar effects bring down the price of insulin (even if it's still three times the price of any first-world country). It would be even better if Congress were to sit down and write decent legislation instead. But my unicorn and I won't be holding our breaths on that.

thenerdhead 3y ago

https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/0cdd88059165eef3bed1fc587a0fd68a/aspe-drug-price-tracking-brief.pdf https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/0cdd88059... Jeeze some of these are crazy. The notable one I was aware of was Paxlovid.