Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it
Making billionaires, one patent at a time.
Today (Oct 19), I’m in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I’m at Charleston’s Taylor Books from 12h-14h.
The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies — patents — to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders’ capital in research.
There’s plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:
And that “R&D” isn’t what you’re thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to “evergreening” — coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:
