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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (8188)	8/12/2009 1:25:39 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Perhaps the length of a patent should be determined, in part, by the number of R&D dollars spent to obtain it, something like that. If a drug company can get only a 5 year patent for a drug they can't recoup the investment in, why bother? But consider, are you creating a perverse incentive to spend more in developing the drug...

To: i-node who wrote (8188)	8/12/2009 1:47:41 PM
From: skinowski	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42652

When Obama talks, as he did yesterday, about shortening the terms of drug patents Did he? I missed it. To my knowledge a drug company has 16 years from the time they apply to FDA. The catch is that usually it takes several years from the time of application until the time of the drug being approved for marketing. Often all they have is just a few years to recup their costs and to make a profit. What would happen if they shorten that period? my guess is that for starters it would kill off many biotech upstarts -- because big companies would become even more conservative in buying potential products for their pipelines. We think that new antibiotics are expensive? It is safe to say that by the time government wise men are done messing things up, those prices will increase dramatically. The truly scary scenario, however, is if we have to deal with organisms which are resistant to ALL existing antibiotics. Even under the best circumstances this is becoming a growing danger.