September 16, 2016
The NYT had a good article on the lobbying effort by Mylan, the manufacturer of EpiPen, to have its product labeled as a preventive drug by the federal government. If EpiPen can get this label, then insurers will not be allowed to require patients to make a copayment. This means that patients will not directly see the price of the drug, although it will be passed on in the form of higher insurance premiums. Mylan is betting that this will make it easier to charge prices that are several thousand percent above its cost of production.
The piece reports on Mylan’s intensive lobbying campaign to gain preventive status. Mylan has paid for research, paid consulting fees to academics, and paid patient advocacy groups to promote use of EpiPen and help gain it the status of a preventive medicine.
This is exactly the sort of corruption that is predicted by economic theory when government intervention creates a large gap between the protected price and the free market price. While EpiPen would likely sell for $10–$20 in a free market, its patent protection allows it to sell for several thousand percent above this price. Economic theory predicts that a tariff of 10–20 percent will provide incentives for the beneficiaries to lobby to increase the benefits of this protection. In the same way a patent monopoly that raises the price of the protected product by 2000 percent will provide similar incentives, except they will be several orders of magnitude larger.
This is relevant to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) since one of its main outcomes will be to make patents and related protections, especially for prescription drugs, longer and stronger. While its proponents, including the news sections of major newspapers like the NYT, call the TPP a “free trade” agreement, most tariff barriers between the countries in the deal are already low. The effects of increased patent and related protections will almost certainly have a greater impact than the modest reduction in tariffs provided for in the deal.
Therefore the TPP can more accurately be thought of as a protectionism pact. It will increase the number and importance of EpiPen-type incidents in the United States and other countries in the TPP.
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