USA Today (3/25, Wolf) reports,
"Consumers will have billions of dollars on the line today when the
Supreme Court hears the government's case charging antitrust collusion
between brand-name and generic drugmakers. What's in dispute, though, is
whether the questionable deals cheat consumers - or whether they come out
ahead." The Federal Trade Commission "has been on a decade-long
crusade to stop settlements in which brand-name drugmakers pay generics to
stay out of the $250 billion U.S. drug market for a specified number of
years," but drug manufacturers "say that without such settlements,
millions of dollars would be wasted in litigation, and when generics lose
patent challenges, the lower-cost drugs would remain off the market even
longer, until the patent expires."
The New York Times (3/25, Wyatt, Subscription
Publication) reports, "The case, Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis,
No. 12-416, centers on whether the maker of a brand-name drug can pay a
generic-drug company to keep the generic version off the market. Based on
antitrust law, the obvious answer would seem to be no, the view voiced by the
government and most recently upheld by a federal appeals court. At least
three other federal appeals courts have previously said those payments are
legal, however, when made under the settlement of a patent infringement
lawsuit. Those courts sided with drug company arguments that the payments are
what Congress intended in setting up guidelines to encourage the production
of generic drugs. The question before the justices pits a company's
constitutional right to protect its intellectual property - through reliance
on a patent that excludes competitors - against antitrust law, which holds
that a company cannot unfairly exclude others from legitimately entering a
business with a rival product."
The AP (3/25, Holland, Johnson) reports,
"The Obama administration, backed by consumer groups and the American
Medical Association, says these so-called 'pay for delay' deals profit the
drug companies but harm consumers by adding 3.5 billion annually to their
drug bills. But the pharmaceutical companies counter that they need to
preserve longer the billions of dollars in revenue from their patented
products in order to recover the billions they spend developing new drugs.
And both the large companies and the generic makers say the marketing of
generics often is hastened by these deals."
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Monday, March 25, 2013
High Court To Consider Settlements That Slow Entry Into Generic Drug Market.
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