On the 100x Price Rise of a Formerly Generic Drug

I watched the whole thing. I think that most people would be shocked by the things Shuren and Latta said, if only they had heard them.

Thanks for posting this!

Well, that's why democracy must be limited by individual rights. Remember, an unlimited democracy voted Socrates to die when it ordered him drink hemlock. It was his punishment for "corrupting" the youths of Athens.

America was founded as a republic limited by a constitution, and it existed that way for a long time. It wasn't an unachieved pie-in-the-sky wonderland (nor was it perfect: I think the civil war was a just and necessary war).

You can make this world better. It's just a matter of understanding things well enough to argue rationally for the right thing. After all, how did the Rennaisance happen, or the American revolution? The people that lived then were just like you and I in this respect, and they didn't even have the benefit of the Internet to communicate.

How is your statement any different from "I can't believe that several people don't agree with me"?

Or could it be that there really is something to these ideas? There is a strong intellectual foundation here, and while the novel you mentioned describes much of it, a much fuller explanation can be found in her nonfiction work.

As an intellectual movement, we're gaining steam. Here's a recording of a debate held in NY between Yaron Brook (aynrand.org) and Miles Rapoport (demos.org) just five days ago: http://www.archive.org/details/FirstPrinciples-Government_Wh...

Here's a link to the debate site (WNYC is New York public radio): http://www.wnyc.org/articles/its-free-country/2011/mar/02/de...

Right now, most people don't agree, but when they hear these ideas out out, they do realize that they constitute a respectable argument (and one that they haven't heard before).

Twenty years from now, our ideas will be mainstream in the sense that most people will have heard them and have some idea of what they are (and how they're different from conservativism and libertarianism). Obviously, people will never agree with everything that anyone has to say, but that isn't the point. The point is to get people to think about this stuff in a productive way. The more people that do that, the better.

The common case isn't the drug company messing up. It's that the FDA gets in the way of a new drug (stopping it forever in some cases), and the patient with the incurable disease dies because there is no legally available treatment. With the FDA, his right to pursue what remains of his life is sacrificed to the FDA's illusion of safety.

Human life is so important, and the needs of each individual body are frequently so diverse from one another, that we can't trust decisions like these to a one-size-fits-all regulatory body.

This is yet another case where ethics and politics is a life-and-death matter (and for more people than you'd ever care to think about).

The thing is, big pharma escapes liability ALL THE TIME.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/29/60minutes/main7195...

Not sure if you are the down-voter. But regardless of that I have to say, I totally believed in what you just wrote, said so much myself if you note my last paragraph. But I was naive then. I have come to realize that the situation you describe is mostly hypothetical and fictional...good argument to buy favors...but not one that represents reality. The private companies are not the ones who are spending money or taking the risks in developing new drugs/molecules (it is mostly the tax payers by way of NIH). If it were the companies then I wouldn't mind it all. The companies do spend money. But it is not in the (re)search for more effective or new drugs.

Edit: Re govt funding, I have quite a few friends who are in drug research, well, in the capacity of current and ex grad students and spread across 3 universities and a research institute. All of them are fed funded, and they claim that this is generally the rule rather than the exception. In my opinion the privilege of exclusivity should be doled out in proportion to the aggregated (monetary)risks entertained.

Edit2: Don't like threads that nest too deep, so adding here. I would readily concede that I wouldn't have names of drugs at the drop of the hat. My opinions are largely assimilated from my friends working in the area and what I get to read. So hardly the person who would be able to quote stats. Recently an application for extending the period of protection for a anti-retroviral drug was denied in India on the grounds that the molecular change adds nothing to the efficacy of the drug and that the molecular changes in itself do not constitute a non-obvious modification to the chemical to a person of the trade. However, denials of extension like these are very very rare. It is common to keep extending a patent on an old molecule in quantums of decades at a time (Now I wish I had it bookmarked)

However I think your test is stricter than need be. As I said, I am looking for proportionality between risk taken and period of exclusivity. That can be broken even if the govt did not carry the full weight from end to end (the example that you are seeking). Generally it is the research phase that incurs the most uncertainty and the kind of research that targets greater efficiency or cheaper production, not what will get the drug or derivative an extended protection.

In the context of the older Indian scene, it was the govt funded labs that carried out the research, so it made perfect sense that patents be granted on the process and not on the compound. It also makes sense for the govt to be in the business of funding drug research as for many of the diseases the affected demographics are not most lucrative. (Well unless one is of the opinion that such a population is better of dead, not an unheard of opinion on the net) The research scene is still the same but the laws have been changed subject to international pressure.

There is substantial benefit to be had by driving costs down. In the current scheme of things there are very little incentives to do so.

"then they should get exclusive rights" - you say this like it's a tautology, like it's self-evident, but it's not. What you are actually arguing is "then the government should grant the company an exclusive monopoly", like some kind of royal commission (which is, of course, the source of the word patent, with letters patent etc.). It's the antithesis of the free market.