Americans endure to suffer the highest prescription drug costs of anyone in the world. One in four are impotent to fill prescriptions due to high prices, according to a recent poll. And the score with though drug prices tripled over the last decade, analysts prophesy they will double again in the next ten years.
We have a fugitive problem on our hands, and while new proposals from Congress and the president request to improve the drug pricing system, we will fail to reach enduring solutions unless we address a root factor in this national critical time: patents.
Contrary to the Trump administration’s recent claims, the source of our preparation drug problems is not “foreign freeloading” governments creating unfair cost schemes—it’s the unfair pricing systems created right here in the U.S. Today’s poison patent monopolies are deeper, longer and stronger than at any point in the survive century—and it’s costing Americans and people around the world.
Before a medication drug even enters the market—before pricing negotiations chance between payers, government agencies, insurers, and so on—the U.S. patent office confers exclusivity to drug makers for intellectual property claims that prepare a huge impact on the market.
And unfortunately, while patenting is an important way for incentivizing and rewarding invention, pharmaceutical companies have figured out how to distraction the system—prolonging monopolies, claiming newness where there continually is none, and taking patients on a ride they can barely afford.
In a fresh study of every drug on the market between 2005 and 2015, a University of California Primary of Law professor found a “startling departure from the classic conceptualization of polymath property protection for pharmaceuticals.”
Instead of going to new medicines, the study catch sight ofs that 74 percent of new patents during the decade went to painkillers that already existed. It found that 80 percent of the precisely 100 best-selling drugs extended their exclusivity protections at least years, and 50 percent extended their patents more than in a wink—with the effect of prolonging the time before generics could reach the bazaar as drug prices continued to rise.
The strategy is called “evergreening”: upper makers add on new patents to prolong a drug’s exclusivity, even when the adding ups aren’t fundamentally new, non-obvious, and useful as the law requires.
One of the most expensive cancer drugs on the superstore, Revlimid®, is a case in point: priced at over $125,000 per year of treatment, Celgene has requested 105 patents on Revlimid®, many of which have been awarded, extending its monopoly until the end of 2036. That gives the Revlimid® self-evident portfolio a lifespan of 40 years, which is being used to blank out or deter generic competitors from entering the market.
But a recent I-MAK opinion finds that several of Celgene’s patents are mere add-ons—not fundamentally new to warrant a patent. And because of the thicket of patents around Revlimid®, payers are projected to shell out $45 billion in excess costs on that drug alone as weighed to what they could be paying if generic competitors were to present when the first patent expires in 2019. Meanwhile, Celgene is also among the pharmaceuticals that get been recently scolded by the FDA for refusing to share samples with generic makers so they can trial their own products against the brands in order to attain FDA approval.
In the paucity of genuine competition in the U.S. prescription drug market, monopolies are yielding trust in pricing schemes and prohibitively expensive drugs for Americans (and people about the world) who need them. In 2015, for example, U.S. Senators Wyden and Grassley start after an 18-month bipartisan investigation that the notorious $84,000 reward tag for the hepatitis C drug made by Gilead was based on “a pricing and marketing plan designed to maximize revenue with little concern for access or affordability.”
Gilead’s next hepatitis C drug Harvoni® was introduced to the market at a still higher rate of $94,500. Who benefits when drugs are priced so high? Not the 85 percent of Americans with hepatitis C who are notwithstanding not able to afford treatment.
“Since the early 2000s, very few new drugs or clues have provided a tangible advance for patients,” the French medical annual Prescrire wrote in 2014. This is the problem with drug amount today. Plenty of top-dollar drugs armored in patents, but too few solutions for patients that are genuinely affordable and pragmatic.
Until our patent system is reformed, the pharmaceutical industry will extend to abuse it—denying real competition, blocking incentives for actual new stupefy discoveries and using clever marketing strategies around “new” products that do not better health outcomes.
For a free and competitive market that will in reality help America’s patients, what we really need is to restore fairness to the trade mark system in the U.S. It may be convenient to blame foreign countries or insurance companies or any bunch of culprits for our high drug prices, but until we look at the heart of the pretty pickle and stop deflecting, patients in the U.S. and around the world will continue to be deficient in treatments they can access and afford.
Tahir Amin is the co-founder and co-executive steersman of I-MAK.org, a non-profit organization comprised of senior attorneys, scientists and healthiness experts who have worked to lower drug prices for 15 years. Fathom him on Twitter @IMAKGlobal .