Prizes Shouldn’t Replace Patents: Reader Poll
2 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // October 26th, 2007 // 2:38 pm
The other day, we wrote about a bill introduced by Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, who proposes eliminating market exclusivity for new drugs. Instead, inventors or developers would receive cash rewards from a new “Medical Innovation Prize Fund.†A key requirement - the products have to improve health outcomes.
The funding would start at $80 billion a year, and increase with the growth in the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. The idea is to eliminate monopolies and allow generic competition in the hopes that drugs prices would fall ‘dramatically,’ and produce savings of more than $200 billion a year.
Each Each new prescription drug or biologic registered by the FDA would “win†something from the prize fund, but the amount given to a developer would vary, according to the evidence, obtained over 1o years, that the product improved healthcare outcomes.
Using metrics such as Quality Adjusted Life Years, the fund managers would estimate benefits compared to benchmarks of existing meds, and divide the $80 billion fund on the basis of relative effectiveness in improving health outcomes. Products that produced more benefits would get a larger share of the prize fund than products that produced fewer benefits. This is a novel idea. And we asked what you thought. Most disapproved, and some offered their opinions in the comments section. We hope to have more on this next week.
Should prizes replace the current patent system?
No - 52 votes, or 62 percent;
Yes - 32 votes, or 38 percent.
Someone
It would have been a good idea to capture some of the demographics of the voting public on this one.
Just guessing, but I think it might have been mostly pharmaceutical people and probably very few actual consumers.
The arguments agents prizes for inventors as a way to thwart monopolies thereby helping to create more competitive competition and therefore better pricing were a touch on the “red herring” side. The argument about hardly recouping ROI on drugs was a nice touch, I am still blowing my nose and crying over the tragedy of it all - please give us a break…
Pharma’s is notorious for fattening themselves up so they can lay off and get everyone nervous and jumpy, hmm, I wonder if there is a pill for this…
Anyway, I can only see good things - lower drug costs, savings for the public. Not to mention better competition to generate and stimulate truly innovative advances in drugs and treatment therapies.
Hope this idea picks up some traction…
TODD
Come on, either way it doesn’t matter as there is 0 chance of anything dramatic such as this happening. There is a better chance Haliburton goes entirely green and tries to power Iraq with wind and sun energy. Go ahead and complain about prices, never realizing you could actually offset that by investing in pharma companies. Some complain that gas is expensive, well my energy stocks have gone thru the roof so it seems to be a wash for me.
Good thing there are absolutely no issues with generics, right? Especially with new breakthrough meds, I am very happy with an orange book definition of 80-125% bioavailability. I know, you don’t understand that last statement which is the very reason they don’t ask you.
So go ahead, use your head and use the power of capitalism to even things out for you. BTW - pharma still accounts for about 10% of the $2 trillion spent on health, I am just guessing there are bigger fish out there. Seen any multimillion dollar beautiful hospitals in depressed areas of the country?
But, congress was just about to pass this and then they saw this poll and veto’d it. So close…….