February 24, 2015
It’s always exciting to read an interesting new idea in the NYT opinion section. It’s less exciting to read an idea that is not new, but presented as such. Hence my lack of joy when reading Ezekiel Emanuel’s proposal for a prize fund for the development of new antibiotics.
Emanuel wants the government to put up a $2 billion prize for the first five companies that get regulatory approval for a new antibiotic. He writes his piece as though a prize fund for developing drugs is a new idea. It isn’t. The idea of prize funds for developing drugs goes back close to two decades (possibly longer), and has had many prominent proponents, most notably Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winning economist.
Emanuel does have an original twist on his proposal. Stiglitz and other proponents of prize funds saw them as an alternative to patents. The idea was that the company got paid for their research when they got the prize. There was no reason to pay them a second time by giving them a monopoly over the sale of the drug.
In fact, one of the main points of the prize was to allow drugs to be sold at their free market price. This would both ensure that they were affordable (drugs are almost always cheap to produce) and eliminate the drug companies’ incentive to lie about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs.
Emanuel does depart from earlier proponents of prize funds in proposing that drug companies be allowed to have a patent monopoly even after having been awarded with a prize. This leaves in place the potential problems of affordability and perverse incentives that earlier proponents of prize funds had sought to address.
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