| Those who oppose reforming our healthcare system frequently extol the virtues of the free market as the real path to comprehensive healthcare reform. Anything else, they insist, is 'socialism' and an affront to 'liberty' and 'freedom' - or something.
I have to wonder, though, if these free lovers of freedom and illiberal lovers of liberty are aware of this?
Over the last few years, drug-makers have embraced a startlingly simple tactic for fending off competition from generic brands: paying them off. In a nutshell, the company that holds the patent on a profitable drug strikes a deal with the maker of the cheaper generic brand: you hold off on marketing your generic for several years, and in return, we'll give you a share of our profits on the drug.
So common have these deals become lately that they've been given a name: pay-for-delay. The approach -- a textbook anti-competitive tactic -- is worth billions to drug-makers, because it essentially allows them to buy more protection than their patent confers.
That was made more or less explicit by Frank Balsino, the CEO of Cephalon, which makes the sleep-disorder drug Provigil. In a 2006 interview, Baldino trumpeted recent deals with four generic drug-makers that kept generic versions of Provigil off the market until 2012, declaring: "We were able to get six more years of patent protection. That's $4 billion in sales that no one expected."
Now...what was that the anti-reform crowd was saying about letting the free market work and we would all benefit? Cuz I'm not seeing it, but I am pretty sure that Adam Smith didn't say word one about the invisible hand fisting the little guy. But that is pretty much what is happening.
Drug companies, run by scoundrels who wrapped themselves in the flag to gull the rubes into doing their dirty work for them by squawking and shrieking about liberty and freedom and socialists and the magic of competition and the free market, while they undermine to free market by paying off their competitors to get them to not compete. |
