Linda clearly wants to play on the grass
Christ Church, Oxford University
I cannot eat breakfast without something to read. Well, or someone to talk to, but that is rare
these days. Usually I read the Economist, but owing to the expanding
muddle inhabiting my skull I
forgot to renew my subscription. That
lead me to spend $3.00 on a Wall Street
Journal this morning – God help my
finances if my new Economist subscription takes very long to arrive. (For you liberals muttering that I should
have purchased the New York Times instead;
it was $4.50. Remember when you could
get a good newspaper for a quarter? No,
of course you don’t.) But anyway, I
found an interesting article in today’s Journal
which I wanted to share with you, but the cheapskates won’t let me access
it on line unless I subscribe, which I will not do. The article is framed as an attack on
Hillary, but it has some good stuff on the FDA and generic drugs which I will
summarize below.
As all of you know, if a drug company dreams up a new drug
it must get permission from the Federal Drug Administration to place the drug
on the market. This costs many millions
of dollars and sometimes takes a half-dozen years or so. However, if the drug is approved the company
then has exclusive right to manufacture and market it for a set period of
time. When that time is up the drug
becomes “generic”, and its price usually falls dramatically. I thought that becoming generic was automatic,
quick and cheap, but I was wrong. If
your wonder drug for growing hair recently has gone off patent and I want to
manufacture an identical generic, I must submit something called an Abbreviated
New Drug Application to the FDA. This
can cost me between $1 and $5 million! There
are said to be thousands of such drugs waiting approval; on average, four submissions
and resubmission are required. Also,
there has been a recent “crackdown “on generic
drug manufactures, which the author of the piece – a medical doctor but
also obviously a conservative – views with some skepticism. The bulk of the piece nit-picks some of
Hillary’s pronouncements on drug pricing, but that part can be ignored with no
significant loss of value. Who cares
what Hillary thinks, anyway – Biden/Warren looms.
The moral of this story seems to be:
Some regulation is useful, even necessary, but it is easy to get carried away.
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