Public Citizen's Trade Watch (PDF) has examined the text, released on June 25, of the Peru Free Trade Agreement as revised to bring it into conformance with the agreement that some Democrats in Congress reached with the administration.  Their initial findings are extremely unsettling.  The Peruvian government in the 1980s confronted political violence, hyperinflation, and a dramatic decline in the ability of the state to achieve any goals.

See the Introduction to this series

Patents are the fundamental intellectual property protection (IPP) for physical product or process inventions.  Patents confer monopoly exploitation of these products or processes on the inventors for 20 years from the time of their submission to The Patent and Trademark Office for approval.  This arrangement allows the inventor to reap profits not reduced by competition for a legally limited time in order to encourage innovation.  It also provides some certainty about the invention’s financial return, allowing investments in the commercialization (PDF) of the innovation.

Crossposted from Daily Kos

Crossposted from Daily Kos

Previous diaries in this series described the most important statutes enacted during the past quarter century that created an intellectual property protection (IPP) regime both robust and unique to the pharmaceutical industry.  This diary will rely on the previous ones as background to allow me to discuss the little-known ways in which Congress has ignored consumer interests when legislating that regime and a few of the almost unknown ways the innovator pharma companies exploit the regime to maintain their sales monopolies beyond the time their patents would have expired.

Crossposted from Daily Kos

See Introduction and Part I

My last diary described the unique intellectual property regime for the pharmaceutical industry created by the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act.  This installment will briefly describe additional intellectual property protections (IPP) Congress has granted that industry.  

The following enumeration of major, long-term IPP legislation directed at the pharmaceutical industry is based on a report compiled by The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) (PDF).  

Crossposted from Daily Kos

Until recently, the pharmaceutical industry enjoyed the highest profits of any industry in the Fortune 500.  In recent years, the industry’s position has declined—to fifth place in 2006, and second place in 2007.  These extraordinary profits depend entirely on "intellectual property protections" (IPP).   The most fundamental example of such protection is a patent, a form of IPP available to all inventors.  For big pharma, however, Congress has created a unique IPP regime, one that gives the industry advantages enjoyed by no other industry.

For earlier diaries describing the Congressional push to privatize Medicare at any and all costs, see August,September and October 2006.

The health insurance industry, represented by its trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) just won its first major victory during the 110th Congress.  It killed a plan to save the Medicare program as much as $8 billion in 2008, $65 billion over the next five years and $160 billion over the next ten years.  Congressional Budget Office, March 21, 2007 (PDF).

Crossposted from Dailykos

We all know that our current healthcare "system" is in crisis.  Some 47 million US inhabitants have no health insurance and therefore very limited, if any, access to healthcare.  That number increases daily.  An incalculable number of people have inadequate insurance; that number also increases daily.  And, as nyceve has repeatedly documented, even those who are "well insured" by today’s standards can never be sure that insurance companies will actually reimburse their beneficiaries for any particular medical service.