The White House is threatening the patents of high-priced drugs developed with taxpayer dollars
The White House is threatening the patents of high-priced drugs developed with taxpayer dollars
The Biden administration is putting pharmaceutical companies on notice. Washington is warning them that if the price of certain drugs is too high, the government might cancel their patent protection and allow rivals to make their own versions.
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Sounds like a toothless threat, following through would upset too many campaign donors.
It's not toothless. There is an existing law that allows the government to issue their own licenses for drugs still under patent developed using at least some amount of tax payer money under certain circumstances. It's pretty broadly worded in the law when this can be done, so previously regulations were made to define the circumstances more precisely. The administration is issuing a new regulation that says one of those circumstances will now include if the drug is high priced limiting its access. Because new regulations issued by the executive branch have a mandatory public comment period after they are proposed before they take effect, its not active quite yet but will be soon (that's why every headline about this is using the dumb vague word of threaten). The drug companies are already promising to sue to try and overturn the new regulation. So yeah it's got teeth.
Thank you, I came to this comment section hoping someone would explain what exactly the basis in law was for this.
This is the specific law Biden is trying to derive the authority from if you're interested in more:
The corporate christofascist supreme court will overturn any executive power expansion as long as their team is not the executive.
Maybe. Hopefully not. All the more reason to follow every little process for new executive regulations flawlessly when enacting it, like the 6 month comment period. A lot of people are saying just do it immediately. But that'd just be giving the pharma companies and republicans an easy out to strike it down in the courts.