My best friend is just 49 years old, and he takes 23 (!) prescription drugs every day, just to keep his ailments in check. Of course, some of these pills are designed to do nothing more than counteract the side effects of others. That’s a story for another day, but the upshot is that my friend and tens of millions of Americans rely on prescription drugs to stay healthy and, in many cases, to stay alive. Nowadays, three times as many seniors take five or more pills a day, compared to just 20 years ago. Increasingly, medical science revolves around pharmaceuticals, and so, for better or worse, does the American way of life.
All this makes it positively maddening that pharmaceutical companies are so often run not in the interests of the American people, who they theoretically serve, but in the pursuit of greater and greater profits. One trick that drug companies have used to maximize these financial gains is the filing of patents to protect their monopolies over the sale of specific medications. These patents run out after 20 years, however, meaning that the drugs can then be produced and sold by a variety of companies and/or in cheaper, generic forms. After 20 years, therefore, the profit-taking is supposed to abate, and drugs that Americans have to come rely on become more readily available.
If you’re reading this as a pharmaceutical executive, this is the point in the story where you exclaim, “Whoa, there! We can’t have that. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the pharmaceutical gravy train went on forever?”
Well, if you’ve got teams of hotshot lawyers and legions of D.C. lobbyists on your side, this is a problem that is eminently fixable. How? The obvious solution is a ruse called “patent trolling.” If your highly lucrative patent on a popular drug is about to run out, you simply reengineer the medication by tweaking it in subtle, i.e. chemically significant but functionally insignificant, ways. Presto! Your 20-year monopoly just got renewed, and a whole new generation of suckers – uh, customers – will be forking over millions, if not billions, mostly in the form of higher insurance premiums. Oh, and of course federal outlays on Medicare and Medicaid will skyrocket too – but who really cares about that?
What’s worse, these gimmicks don’t just jack up pharmaceutical prices (which, in themselves, prevent some patients from accessing the drugs they need). They can also create shortages of drugs on which millions of Americans rely. These shortages have become critical in some cases, and even life-threatening. You would think that when the quest for greater profits becomes deadly, Big Pharma might run up the white flag and act responsibly for a change – but not necessarily!
The same greed that dictates chicanery like patent trolling also explains why Big Pharma and its hordes of lobbyists are pursuing a vendetta against pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). These are organizations that negotiate on behalf of medical insurance plans to lower prescription drug costs. They have a strong record of saving consumers and taxpayers billions.
“Eek!” says the typical pharmaceutical executive.
Recently, numerous bills have been introduced in the House and the Senate to kneecap PBMs and to deprive them of their leverage in the pharmaceutical marketplace. Gee, I wonder why a drug company, or a drug wholesaler, would want to do that?
The moral of the story is simple: Americans already pay way too much for most prescription drugs, and they will soon pay even more, if these Big Pharma shenanigans are not curtailed by federal legislation. That legislation, though, could just as easily end up making the problem worse, instead of better. In fact, that may even be likely, given the mountains of cash Big Pharma is plowing into its lobbying efforts. Every American, therefore, who cares about fairness and access to health care needs to stay on top of this issue.
Consider contacting your representative in the House and your senators, to tell them that the coddling of Big Pharma needs to stop, as does patent trolling and the legislative persecution of PBMs. Billions of dollars are at stake, yes – but this is even, at times, a question of life or death. It is, therefore, a battle we cannot afford to lose.
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