New York State is standing athwart medical progress yelling “STOP!” In a move straight from the pages of Atlas Shrugged, the state sued Forest Laboratories, the subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Actavis that makes the Alzheimer’s drug Namenda IR, to force the company to continue making the drug, which was being phased out in favor of the new Namenda XR (which, among other improvements, need only be taken once a day rather than twice—a not insignificant plus when dealing with Alzheimer’s patients!).
Why would New York’s attorney general want to interfere with medical progress and the development of a better drug that would improve the lives of potentially millions of Americans? Perhaps to reduce state drug costs—maybe the state feels that the marginal benefit from switching to XR isn’t worth the marginal cost—or to provide a competitive advantage to the generic pharmaceutical industry (under New York law, when a patent expires—as IR’s will in a few months—the remaining prescriptions automatically switch to generics).
The state’s claim relies on some very dubious antitrust law and seeks to force Forest Labs to keep producing and offering IR under the same “terms and conditions” as before XR came out. Not only would this keep patients using an older, inferior drug, it would effectively compel Forest to support its competitors’ business strategy. The generics were already set to benefit from the hundreds of millions of R&D dollars Forest Labs spent developing IR, but now they get free advertising too.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/judges-shouldnt-tell-businesses-which-products-make-market
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