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.
I bet he won’t even have to use this power and prices will miraculously decline by themselves. During the energy crisis after Russia attacked Ukraine, our German power companies and oil refineries came under scrutiny as a (albeit badly drafted) government program to lower gas prices just didn’t lower prices at all. Our energy secretary then made an announcement that the government was checking if they could get the anti-trust-agency involved for price hiking and split up some companies if need be. The next day, die to “some lucky events on the world oil markets” prices for oil started to go down. It was a miracle!
I can see that. When California announced earlier this year that it would begin to make its own insulin and sell it for $30, companies suddenly began dropping their prices to $35 to match.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1164572757/california-contract-cheap-insulin-calrx
The vast majority of problems are caused by companies price gouging, from medicine to groceries. I just hope the threats are backed with action if they refuse to lower prices.
I’ve always found it interesting how the threat of government intervention gets companies to behave properly. I suppose they’d rather voluntarily be less garbage than be forced to by law.
Be careful what you wish for. Congress started looking into video game violence in the 90s, threatening to put some regulations down. The industry responded by creating the ESRB and its ratings system, and congress left them alone. It’s questionable if congress could have actually done anything that passes constitutional scrutiny, but the industry would have had to spend a lot of money to fight that battle, and this was a better outcome for them.
Now, I think that was initially a win for the average gamer–nothing gets banned, and the industry comes up with universal ratings guidelines. However, just like the MPAA rating system, it can be used to bully out independents. The ESRB also creates a framework for legally defending the industry’s ability to put lootboxes and other exploitative gambling mechanics into games. Now you need to supervise your kid playing FIFA more than any Mortal Kombat game.
Sorry I’m out of touch with this these days, but does the esrb even matter anymore? At least on PC a lot of games aren’t even rated. Or if they are, it’s barely a factor. And lots of kids just play mobile games, which also aren’t rated by the ESRB either.
They’re still a lobbying arm of the industry. They can also slap an AO rating on something and big retailers won’t carry it.
They also run e3, but that’s pretty much dead now, too.
Edit: and I realized I should have said “ESA”, not “ESRB”. ESA is the organization, ESRB is the ratings system.