Pharmaceutical Patent Policy

Those who market their own drugs get 10 - 15 years of exclusivity for their creation plus whatever lobbying the company can do to increase this benefit for certain drugs.

I started writing this last night, but I passed out due to exhaustion and finished a couple more sentences right now. I’ll address the rest of your post when I have time.

The company must accumulate enough income during that 10-15 year period in order to compensate for the deficits created by the parallel R&D projects that were run in lieu with the pill (scrapped investment before seeking FDA approval), the cost of running FDA and supplemental clinical trials (FDA approval step), and dealing with generic competition (which according to calculations using Monte Carlo) that result in an 80% sales loss for the parent company upon patent expiration. In order to bring in prospective profit, pharmaceutical companies will try a variety of different strategies in order to sell their product. Pharmaceutical companies are known to put expensive prices on medication in order to cash in on short-term profits. For long-term benefits, pharmaceutical companies often persuade physicians and hospitals to endorse their product for current and prospective patients. The drastic lengths that pharmaceutical companies go through in order to market their products is affected by the fact that they are on a time scale to sell their own innovation. This process is not efficient or ideal for pharmaceutical companies as many products such as Vioxx have been rushed and clinical tests were not accounted for in revising the pill due to the company’s necessity to produce financial influx off the production of the pill. Forcing pharmaceutical companies to play the part of researcher, tester, and marketer is bound to cause ethical problems as the three components come together synergistically and result in amplified issues that are more efficiently considered on an individual level. Legislation should be mandated to mitigate a successful solution towards maximizing the efficiency of such companies, rather than relying on the legislation stipulated by Hatch-Waxman act that is obsolete in fulfilling this requirement as its basis exists in situations that faced 1984.

As a brief side note, I do not condemn generic drug companies. I have stock in Teva Pharmaceuticals and agree with the principle that they provide affordable pills for many individuals. I am primarily concerned that pharmaceutical companies have been constantly downsizing R&D departments (Pfizer firing researchers in order to prepare for the termination of Astorvastatin patent) which could possibly result in many drugs failing to be produced or innovated. If there is no innovation, then there can be no generics.