Why Biden’s proposed patent seizures will hurt patients

The Hill reports today that: The Biden administration is rolling out a framework to enforce the government’s march-in authorities on drugs developed with taxpayer dollars, saying if drugmakers refuse to make their products “reasonably” available, then the government is prepared to give other companies license to produce those drugs at a lower cost…. If the company refuses…

Quantifying the Long-Run Economic and Health Impact of Reduced Intellectual Property Protections for New Drugs

That is the title of a new working paper written by myself, any my FTI Consulting colleagues Sabiha Quddus and Suhail Thahir. The abstract is below. Some policymakers have called for weakening of intellectual property protections for vaccines and other pharmaceutical products, with the aim to reduce the price and improve access to existing medical…

Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation

That is the title of a 2016 NBER chapter by Heidi Williams and the subtitle is “Evidence from Health Care Markets“. Economic theory back to Nordhaus (1969) predicts that intellectual property rights increase the incentive for firms to invest in research and development and likely this would lead to more innovation. Proving these empirically, however,…

Should we move from patents to prizes?

An interesting article by Charles Silver and David A. Hyman argues that we should do away with patents for pharmaceuticals and move to a prize based system.  They write in Vox: A well-designed prize regime would lower drug prices by eliminating drug monopolies, yet it would also create the necessary incentives for innovation, including incentives to…

How reimbursement affects innovation

Below are some excerpts from seminal papers examining how changes in reimbursement or market size affect pharmaceutical innovation. Acemoglu and Lin (2004): Our estimates suggest that a 1 percent increase in the size of the potential market for a drug category leads to a 6 percent increase in the total number of new drugs entering the…

Open Source Surgery

Currently, robot-assisted surgery today is dominated by the da Vinci Surgical System.  The device is highly regarded, but is heavy (weighs half a ton) and expensive ($1.8m).  Plus it uses proprietary software, which means that physicians and engineers not associated with da Vinci cannot alter its operating system. Change is on the horizon, however. “None…