Crossposted from The GreenState Project |

This, as they say, goes all the way to the top:

The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him to slow down, the prosecutor told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.
*****
Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.

Think about that for a moment while you make the jump.

Who does AHIP, big pharma and the health care special interests fear most--Michael Moore or the next president of the United States?

The answer is depressing, because much as I want to believe that real reform is on the horizon, I have this little demon in my head telling me I'm kidding myself.

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.

The great propaganda campaign to persuade the American people to believe that there is no need for healthcare reform and improvement led by Congress has begun. That’s what the ads on TV are all about. PhRMa, the voice of the pharmaceutical industry, is sponsoring them.