OK. So reduce the patent term for drugs to three years with no renewals. Force the drug companies to earn market share by cutting costs, like most business have to do.
So if you invest $500 million in drug development you'd have three years to make it back.
Why develop drugs?
It's no coincidence that most drugs are developed in the US. All of the countries with socialized medicine depend on the US for their drug supply.
This drug has been available since 1953.
Shortening the patent to 3 years = NO NEW DRUGS.
That would make things even worse, because a drug company that develops a state-of-the-art drug will have to charge an exorbitant price for the drug just to ensure that they can make their money back in a compressed time period before generics flood the market.
Bad idea.
The primary issue with Daraprim is that it is quite close to being an “orphan drug” because of the small number of people who need it.
Cut the patent protection from 20 years to 3 years? That would force the drug companies to increase the wholesale prices to re-coup their investment in three years instead of 20. Also, it would lead to a sharp increase in the number of promising molecules that would never be investigated because there would be no way to re-coup the costs...
Generic houses are bottom feeders - they don’t have to spend billion$ on safety and efficacy studies. So, don’t look there for any kind of solution.
That would be a disastrous idea and would effectively end development of any new drugs.
It takes on average 10 – 12 years for a new drug to make it from an idea and into the lab and through all the testing; the laboratory research, the animal and human trials and through the FDA approval process, if it ever gets approved, and many do not but the R&D costs are still tremendous and are often never recouped and patents are applied for and granted long prior to final FDA approval as to protect their intellectual rights. So in your scenario, a drug maker would lose their patent before even manufacturing and selling their first shipment and another company could start making a generic without ever incurring the original company’s R&D costs and far under cut them in the market from day one. And why just stop at reducing the patent term just for drugs to 3 years? Why not reduce it for everything? Why? Because it would end all innovations.
Force the drug companies to earn market share by cutting costs, like most business have to do
Some costs are in part because of government oversight and regulations (FDA). And while I have some issues with the FDA, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Look up the history behind why the FDA was created in the first place – “patent medicines” and “snake oil treatments”. At one time anyone could make and sell a “patent drug” or elixir and they didn’t have to disclose any of the actual ingredients, often with high amounts of alcohol and or cocaine or heroin and all sorts of impurities and they could make all sorts of outrageous claims about what these elixirs would “cure”.
http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/Ni-Ra/Patent-Medicine.html
http://www.hagley.org/online_exhibits/patentmed/history/history.html
Also see my post here were I attempt to explain the costs involved in getting a drug from lab to FDA approval to into patients, having seen it first hand:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3340301/posts?page=46#46