I thought conks loved competition.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/can_the ... ug_prices/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;The Supreme Court oral arguments on marriage equality deserved all the attention they received — but it’s another case heard this week that will affect even more people over the course of their lifetimes. And it could cost Americans millions in prescription drug bills.
The case falls within a sadly predictable continuum for the Roberts Court, which virtually always sides with the corporate litigant over the government or individual. This time, the arguments in FTC v. Actavis revolve around an insidious tactic common to the nation’s largest drug companies, and known as “pay for delay.” As a result of the likely ruling in this case, drug companies will be able to charge consumers as much as five times the potential cost of their products. And both government regulators and consumers will watch helplessly as pharmaceutical companies bribe generic drug makers to retain their exclusive holds on the lifesaving medicines we all inevitably require.
The first thing to know here is that U.S. pharmaceuticals get a very good deal from the federal government. For every new drug they produce, they get rewarded with long-term patents that grant them exclusive rights to market and sell the product for as much as 20 years – which guarantees them billions in profits and no competitors in the marketplace. Drug companies claim that they must be allowed to profit off of products they nurtured with expensive research and development. In reality, taxpayer-funded research from academia or the National Institutes of Health account for the vast majority of vital drugs brought to market every year, and R&D is a small fraction of the overall drug company budget. What’s more, drug companies routinely use their monopoly power to jack up pharmaceutical prices, which cost far more in the U.S. than anywhere in the world....
The most surefire statement about the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is that corporate interests will win the day. In the 2011-12 term, the Court sided with every case on which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a friend-of-the-court brief, according to the Constitutional Accountability Center. In highly publicized cases like Citizens United and dozens of smaller but no less critical ones, the Court, especially the conservative wing, has tilted toward corporate concerns dramatically, at the expense of ordinary individuals.
In this case, the Chamber of Commerce did not take a position, but practically the entire pharmaceutical industry presented amici briefs in the case, as well as the National Association of Manufacturers, who claim that the FTC’s position would “have an immense impact on the economy.” And even with Alito’s recusal giving the opportunity for a deadlock, the oral arguments strongly suggested that drug companies would get their way.
Nobody lined up for three days waiting to hear arguments in FTC v. Actavis. Nobody stood outside with placards urging the justices to rule one way or the other. But the impact is undeniable. Drug companies basically try to preserve their government-granted monopolies as long as possible, and they routinely pay off their competitors to stay out of the market. The results cost you money. In a case in California over the antibiotic Cipro, the state asserted that one brand-name pill today costs $5.30, but with a generic competitor, the price would fall to $1.10. Multiply that by the size of the marketplace and you have $3.5 billion a year and counting siphoned from sick Americans, for the benefit of drug industry treasuries.
