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Posts Tagged ‘medicine’
October 1st, 2019 at 4:32 pm
Cicilline Bill Would Jeopardize Pharmaceutical Innovation by Weakening Patent Protections
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In the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, it’s important to keep our collective eye on the ball.  In that vein, as CFIF has repeatedly emphasized, we must ensure that free market principles prevail, and that includes protecting patent rights rather than weakening them.  Otherwise, American consumers will pay the price in fewer pharmaceutical innovations, shortages and worse health outcomes.

After all, as we’ve often pointed out, it’s not by accident that the United States accounts for an astonishing two-thirds of all new pharmaceuticals in the world.  That reflects the fact that we lead the world in intellectual property (IP) protections and avoid the destructive price controls that nations favoring socialized medicine impose.  As a consequence, patients in those countries don’t receive the new lifesaving and life-enhancing drugs that we do.

Unfortunately, there’s bad news to report in that regard, as Representative David Cicilline (D – Rhode Island) has introduced the misnamed “Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Through Promoting Competition Act.”  Most conspicuously, his proposal would begin prohibiting patent protections for pharmaceutical innovators developing improvements to their existing products.

Here’s why this is important.  Existing laws that have made us the most innovative nation in history allow for patent protection for new and useful improvements to existing pharmaceuticals.  Such improvements can help patients in such ways as eliminating side effects, reducing the necessary frequency or dosage, enhancing potency, boosting effectiveness or even addressing other illnesses beyond the drug’s original purpose.

But if innovators can no longer expect patent protections for the billions of dollars and years of hard work invested in developing them, then those innovations will begin to dry up.  Developing new or improved drugs typically requires over 10 years, and only approximately 10% of new discoveries actually make it to market after regulatory approval.  Accordingly, we must enhance the prospect that the fruits of innovators’ labors will be obtainable, not diminish them.

Representative Cicilline’s proposed bill is therefore a potentially catastrophic one for American consumers, who rely upon pharmaceutical innovators more and more to save lives and maintain health.  We therefore call upon all Members of Congress to oppose it.

 

January 8th, 2014 at 12:26 pm
Turning ObamaCare’s Failures into a Mandate for Single-Payer

Yesterday, Noam Scheiber of the New Republic defended Obamacare’s failings as a Machiavellian way for liberals to generate public support for even more government control of health care, eventually leading to the creation of a federally-run single-payer system.

“…the law created potentially millions of hard-working Americans who will have some health insurance; just maddeningly insufficient health insurance,” writes Scheiber. “What are the chances politicians stand up and take notice when these Americans complain?”

Fear not fellow liberals, says Scheiber, Obamacare’s disastrous rollout isn’t all bad news. “When you look at the big picture, the underlying political logic is clearly toward more generous, more comprehensive insurance, the natural upshot of cataloguing the law’s shortcomings isn’t to give them less insurance… It’s to give them more.”

In other words, Obamacare can be seen as a two-step process toward a federally-controlled national health system. First, individuals and employees are severed from their current insurance plans. Then, when they see how insufficient are the subsidies in paying for the government’s mandated coverage options, people will demand more money. The end result is having the feds pick up the entire bill as governments do in countries with socialized medicine.

A messy way to get what liberals want? Yes. But it’s worth the cost to pundits like Scheiber if in the end the liberal dream of nationalized health care becomes a reality.

September 17th, 2013 at 5:47 pm
ObamaCare in Your Bedroom?

The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Goldwater Institute are both warning of dire threats to privacy if ObamaCare’s financial incentives and penalties on doctors aren’t changed soon.

The health law’s ‘reforms’ “aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential,” writes Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post.

Topics include asking whether a patient is sexually active, and if so, with what number of partners. Whether a person has same-sex partners is also an area the feds want to know about.

And don’t forget to add in the required questions about a person’s drug history.

Combine this with all the routine yet highly sensitive health information people share with their doctor, and you’ve got the makings for a single-source document that could ruin someone’s life if made public.

To do this, ObamaCare uses financial pressure to compel doctors to participate. Answers go into federally mandated electronic health records. Highly portable, the records can be accessed and shared among regulators.

Resistance won’t be easy.

“Doctors and hospitals who don’t comply with the federal government’s electronic-health-records-requirements forgo incentive payments now; starting in 2015, they’ll face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid,” according to McCaughey. “The Department of Health and Human Services has already paid out over $12.7 billion for these incentives.”

And it’s just going to get worse.

Best advice: Try to convince your doctor to keep two sets of books. One that’s real; the other for the Feds.

ObamaCare: Bringing people together in opposition to their government.