EpiPen said its subsidiary Mylan Inc. has agreed to a $465 million settlement with the Justice Department and other government agencies stemming from the classification of EpiPen for Medicaid rebates. The terms of the settlement “do not provide for any finding of wrongdoing” by Mylan…
The door is now wide open for others to follow their lead.
Meds are the new finance. Pay up or die.
There are undoubtedly other schemes that can be devised that pay for research without giving drug companies monopolies over the distribution of the drug. Obviously we do have to pay for the research, but we don’t have to use the current patent system. It is like paying the firefighters when they show up at the burning house with our family inside. Of course we would pay them millions to save our family (if we had the money), but it is nutty to design a system that puts us in this situation.
Source: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/lower-drug-prices-without-saying-no
Let’s invest heavily in basic research, and offer a system of warrants for firms to pursue. This might incent collaboration as firms could work out arrangements for sharing the warrants, rather than worrying about IP ownership.
It wasn’t until hundreds of years after Marco Polo’s travels that the dramatic transformation of the system of production began—and in a curious place. Wood demonstrates that the capitalist “laws of motion” did not emerge in urban commercial centers, as is normally supposed, but in the countryside. Specifically, the English countryside. English landholding was inordinately concentrated, so “an unusually large proportion of land was worked not by peasant-proprietors but by tenants,” as Wood explains. For most of the feudal age, English tenancies were “Freehold leases,” with rents fixed by a legal or customary standard, but by the sixteenth century, a growing number were “Copyhold leases,” auctioned by landlords to the highest bidder, their rental value set at whatever the market would bear. The more competition there was in the market for rental land, the more notice landlords and their surveyors began to take of the “value above the oulde Rentes” that could be extracted through this market. And so England underwent great waves of land enclosure, separating the masses from direct access to the means of their own subsistence
-Jesse A. Myerson
Source: Markets in the next system – The Next System Project
This needs reading.