The following content is Frontiers of Freedom.
You know it’s bad when a government threatens with anything synonymous with invasion, but that’s the state of America right now.
The Biden administration plans to strengthen government control over prescription drugs byRight to march” is the word used. Bayh-Dole ActA law that gives contractors ownership rights in inventions that result from government-funded research.
The Bayh-Dole Act helped usher in the most explosive period of innovation in human history, producing miracle drugs and advanced technologies never dreamed of when Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole wrote the law 45 years ago. $1.3 trillion Contributing to the economic growth of the United States 11,000 Startups emerging from universities across America. If left unchecked, the protections of the Bayh-Dole Act could enable even more incredible advances over the next 45 years.
But as expected, the Biden administration has no intention of leaving it alone.
The Bayh-Dore Act included provisions that allowed the government to “step in” and steal patent rights when a patent holder “has commercialized a product but the price or other terms on which the product is currently being offered to the public are not reasonable,” particularly in the case of a national emergency.
Kudos to the legislative aides of both senators at the time; their bills were so well-written that they successfully protected patent owners for almost half a century. March-in petitions have never been granted. Moreover, Congress has never established guidelines for what constitutes an unfair price.
That’s a pretty good record for a bipartisan bill signed into law by President Carter in the late 1980s to correct the inflation and economic depression of the 1970s caused by President Carter’s terrible policies. President Reagan was able to implement it, and it undoubtedly helped stimulate the economic boom of the 1980s. President Biden can now use the march-in provisions of this law to His own Bad policies are even worse.
Notably, march-in rights are expected to have little or no impact on drug prices. This is because Recent Research “99% of therapies in our cohort cannot be marched in because the core patents surveyed do not cover the entire intellectual property of the assets. All available MoA (Mechanism of Action) and CoM (Composition of Matter) patents contain government expressions of interest, and only five out of 361 medicines are potentially eligible for march-in rights.”
So rather than Democrats jumping in to help ordinary people who can’t afford health care, this is an example of Democrats jumping in to expand government power. Again.
“Progressives” have long called for the federal government to use its intervention powers, as Hugo Chavez did, to confiscate drug patents and impose price controls. What they did when they were destroying Venezuela.
Even if the situation here wasn’t so bad, price controls are always bad in themselves: if the government cuts off research labs’ financial incentives to develop new technologies, the labs will stop doing that. Drugs, in particular, take a long time to rigorously research and develop before they can be safely brought to market, so pharmaceutical companies need legal protections to know that a return on their investment awaits them after years of risk and effort.
It may seem ironic that progressives want to stop medical progress, but it shows the type of people we’re dealing with here. The bill (originally S. 414) passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously, then ultimately passed the full Senate. Unanimous consentSo Joe Biden, from Delaware (yes, he’s been in Washington for 50 years), supported the bill throughout the entire time the original version was in Congress.
We can thank the good Democrats of the time for the Bayh-Dole Act, but it was passed during the Reagan era. President Trump, our former and future president, is a lover and defender of freedom like President Reagan, and he will no doubt want to continue his tradition of protecting corporations from the federal government swooping in and stealing their inventions.
Biden is once again using drug prices to manipulate people, rally support, and weaponize the government to help him get re-elected. But President Trump knows, as we all know, that freedom and free markets are what make America great. We need to protect innovators from the federal government coming in and stealing their jobs.
