cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9298788
The Biden Administration on Thursday announced it is setting new policy that will allow it to seize patents for medicines developed with government funding if it believes their prices are too high.
The policy creates a roadmap for the government’s so-called march-in rights, which have never been used before. They would allow the government to grant additional licenses to third parties for products developed using federal funds if the original patent holder does not make them available to the public on reasonable terms.
Under the draft roadmap, seen by Reuters, the government will consider factors including whether only a narrow set of patients can afford the drug, and whether drugmakers are exploiting a health or safety issue by hiking prices.
“We’ll make it clear that 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 adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.
This only covers “Taxpayer funded drugs”. apparently.
That’s a huge portion of them. Taxpayers help out a lot at early levels of drug discovery with things like public universities and research grants.
Which is why research papers should be provided for free if they were funded with tax money.
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Man that’s a really important piece of information, it should be in the article title. The greediest companies are not the tax payer funded ones
A good analysis would be to determine what portion of the drug market would fall in this category. I imagine the amount of drug R&D done with some amount of federal dollars is pretty high.
If this policy has enough teeth to scare pharma corps, then it will probably change their behaviors. They could decide that they need to use minimal federal funding which could slow drug development. I wonder if this policy (or others) is meant to address this potential.
No, the greediest companies take all the tax payer funding and research they can before patenting it and pretending they made it, see moderna. Why pay for your research when you can get the taxpayers to do it?