The Mask Slips

The CEO of Genentech is threatening to delay drug roll-outs over the Biden administration's (fairly pathetic) attempt to implement drug price controls.

It seems that if they cannot loot with complete impunity, they will take their marbles and go home.

This why IP in general, and drug patents in particular, should not be an unlimited license to levy economic rents:

A Swiss pharmaceutical company announced this month that it could slow-walk bringing a potentially life-saving drug to market — in order to reduce the time that it could be subject to President Joe Biden’s recently enacted federal price regulations.

Those comments were made by the CEO of Genentech, whose parent company, Roche, has reaped as much as $10 billion from Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, seeing its net income go up by an average of more than 50 percent, while its spending on research and development has increased by just 25 percent.

………

For two decades, Congress prohibited Medicare from negotiating drug prices like most other high-income countries do. As a result, pharmaceutical companies have been able to charge Americans substantially higher prices for their products than they do elsewhere. They’ve done so even though the American public subsidized research and development costs for every drug approved for sale in the U.S. between 2010-19.

Now, thanks to the new law’s drug price provisions, Medicare can begin to negotiate lower prices for 10 drugs beginning in 2026, with additional drugs added in subsequent years.

………

Earlier this month, the health news site STAT published an interview with Genentech CEO Alexander Hardy in which he said that the company could delay the release of an effective drug for ovarian cancers in order to first ensure it is approved to be sold to the largest population of patients before it is subject to the new price controls.

 Seriously, we need to put them in jail and take all their stuff.