Slashdot Mirror
Big Pharma Presses US To Quash Cheap Drug Production In India
An anonymous reader writes "Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), are leaning on the United States government to discourage India from allowing the production and sale of affordable generic drugs to treat diseases such as cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. India is currently on the U.S. government's Priority Watch List — countries whose practices on protecting intellectual property Washington believes should be monitored closely. Last year Novartis lost a six-year legal battle after the Indian Supreme court ruled that small changes and improvements to the drug Glivec did not amount to innovation deserving of a patent. Western drugmakers Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Roche Holding, Sanofi, and others have a bigger share of the fast-growing drug market in India. But they have been frustrated by a series of decisions on patents and pricing, as part of New Delhi's push to increase access to life-saving treatments in a place where only 15 percent of 1.2 billion people are covered by health insurance. One would certainly understand and probably agree with the need for for cheaper drugs. But don't forget that big pharma, for all its problems still is the number one creator of new drugs. In 2012 alone, the U.S. government and private companies spent a combined $130 billion (PDF) on medical research."
It sounds odd, or the start of a joke, but I'm serious.
She ordered some variety of medicine from an online pharmacy (which one, I don't know) and had some heavy cognitive dissonance. 'Did I just give money to scammers?' She waited slightly longer than she expected to, and had the thought that she really had been taken for a ride ... but then they arrived, and (to her surprise) were postmarked India.
"They were cheap, and worked."
She'll be displeased to hear about just how far regulatory capture can go, in this arena ...
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Taxes have nothing to do with communism. In a communism all productive assets is owned by the state. That means farmland, power plants, factories, and all deeded property. Personal property is excluded; the state doesn't care about your model train collection.
Intellectual property would fall under state deeded property just as housing does. That's because only the state manages property deeds and assigns ownership. That the ownership is automatically assigned to the state merely simplifies bureaucratic administrative overhead. The state might be inefficient in aggregate, but not so in the Registration of Deeds office.
I know it's nit picky, but your statement conflates that communist system with every other government system imagined. Every government that has existed taxed its citizens to provide for a common good. Governments tax to build roads, bridges, schools, military and police departments. New research and development is funded through education grants. For example: the internet. Also: medical research. In fact, a lot of tax money is spent on drug development.
Perhaps you think government shouldn't do these things. Some even think government should be abolished. But to argue the abolishment of government on the pretense that taxes equals communism mixes terms and beliefs such that the rationale is nothing more than nonsense. It's no argument. It's not anticommunist or pro-USA or holds any ideological consistency.