Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoo | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone aware of efforts to change laws or regulations that have a non-negligible chance of succeeding, and could restrict the opportunity for this kind of corporate misbehavior in future?

(we can imagine many wildly non-incremental changes, e.g. imagine if the US adopted a UK style NHS! but it's not obvious how one could incrementally get there from the starting point)

View on HN

Just try suggesting that drug patent monopolies be shortened from 20 to 10 years. Watch how much screaming and hand-wringing ensues.

Well those 20 years are where they make all the money - there is a lot of reason to think that they would just double prices if you were to cut that period in half. Given that Humira has made life livable for millions of people with RA, Crohn's and a bunch of other really terrible problems I'd argue it was worth every cent of the $200 billion in sales (we probably spent the same amount on annual UN fees and diplomats over the same time period). I think something should be done about this patent gamesmanship but I find it hard to see them as evil when they have a patient assistance program that covers the overwhelming majority of the population.

The department of state and foreign affairs costs about $55b a year so we spend about five times more a year on diplomats than Humira.

Now exactly why you think it’s reasonable for the country to spend 1/5th of what it costs to run the entirety of foreign diplomacy for the biggest superpower on earth on only a single drug I’m not completely sure.

Because the drug is highly effective and has improved the lives of millions of people? There is a reason Medicare patients are willing to spend 5 grand a year on it. What has the State Department done for me lately?

Look to be fair, a majority of a drug's time under patent will be during development, when they can't make any revenue. It's even been argued that the high cost of new medication is (partially) because they only have a short period of time to actually sell it while under patent (it takes roughly 8-15 years to bring a drug to market).

I personally believe that while these abuses of the system absolutely should be accounted for, reducing the period of patent to 10 years won't help anything.

Considering the anti consumer outcomes existing antitrust would be enough. If only it were actually enforced. More unenforced legislation won't help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com