4 ms·

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 rig

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.
- konschubert 3y ago
  That simply isn’t true. Please provide citations with sources if you’re making extraordinary claims.
  - caycep 3y ago
    I would say the NIH is probably the biggest funder, and those of us coming out of universities earlier in our career - that is where most of us think of asking for money first; mostly as that is the "standard" model of getting into academia (i.e. K grants, R grants, etc). That being said, it seems like there's a decent amount of patents from the private sector as well https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9440766/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9440766/
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    https://www.nih.gov/grants-funding https://www.nih.gov/grants-funding https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-015-0074-z https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... ("The largest funder was the United States National Institutes of Health ($26.1 billion), followed by the European Commission ($3.7 billion), and the United Kingdom Medical Research Council ($1.3 billion).") https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Who-Funds-Clinical-Trials.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Who-Funds-Clinica... ("58% of studies were funded by the government")
    - konschubert 3y ago
      Fair point, especially in that 58% figure. Even though this is only funding for trials and not research, I have to admit that I didn’t expect that and I will concede that it would be on me now to prove that research funding is differently distributed.
stonogo 3y ago
Because those drugs are worthless if people can't afford them. It's also a bit silly to ignore the entire rest of the world's pharmaceutical R&D. Lots of people would gladly give up bragging rights on production metrics if it means they can live healthier lives.

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.

konschubert 3y ago
That simply isn’t true. Please provide citations with sources if you’re making extraordinary claims.
- caycep 3y ago
  I would say the NIH is probably the biggest funder, and those of us coming out of universities earlier in our career - that is where most of us think of asking for money first; mostly as that is the "standard" model of getting into academia (i.e. K grants, R grants, etc). That being said, it seems like there's a decent amount of patents from the private sector as well https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9440766/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9440766/
- gamblor956 3y ago
  https://www.nih.gov/grants-funding https://www.nih.gov/grants-funding https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-015-0074-z https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... ("The largest funder was the United States National Institutes of Health ($26.1 billion), followed by the European Commission ($3.7 billion), and the United Kingdom Medical Research Council ($1.3 billion).") https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Who-Funds-Clinical-Trials.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/Who-Funds-Clinica... ("58% of studies were funded by the government")
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Fair point, especially in that 58% figure. Even though this is only funding for trials and not research, I have to admit that I didn’t expect that and I will concede that it would be on me now to prove that research funding is differently distributed.

stonogo 3y ago

Because those drugs are worthless if people can't afford them. It's also a bit silly to ignore the entire rest of the world's pharmaceutical R&D. Lots of people would gladly give up bragging rights on production metrics if it means they can live healthier lives.