April 10, 2016
The Washington Post is well known as a hotbed of protectionist sentiment, at least when it comes to policies that redistribute income upward. For that reason it was not altogether surprising that the paper never once mentioned the role of patent monopolies and related protections in a front page article on the difficulties cancer patients face in dealing with the high price of drugs.
The article begins by talking about a patient, Scott Steiner, who needed the cancer drug Gleevec. The manufacturer, Novartis, charges $3,500 a month for the drug. The article tells readers that the Mr. Steiner’s insurer was unwilling to pay for the drug and there was no way that he and his family could afford this expense. Fortunately, an oncology social worker (the hero of this article) was able to negotiate a free supply of the drug from the manufacturer.
While this is good news for Mr. Steiner, what the article neglected to mention is that the only reason Gleevec costs $3,500 a month is because the government granted the company a patent monopoly. A high quality of generic version is produced by Indian manufacturers for $2,500 a year.
This difference in prices is equivalent to the United States imposing a 1,600 percent tariff on Gleevec. This patent monopoly leads to all the waste and economic distortions that economists would predict from massive tariffs. Undoubtedly many cancer patients don’t get Gleevec because they can’t afford its patent protected price and are not as lucky as Mr. Steiner in having a social worker who can work out an arrangement with Novartis.
In addition, the whole struggle to get a drug whose price is artificially inflated is a needless waste that is being imposed on people facing a potentially fatal disease. And of course the time spent by a third party is a total waste of resources that would not be necessary if Gleevec were sold at its free market price. In addition, the enormous mark-up received by Novartis gives it an incentive to oversell its drug, promoting it in cases where it may not be the best treatment. (Yes, we have to finance the research, but there are far more efficient mechanisms than this relic of the middle ages.)
While economists have written endless articles and books on the costs of protectionism, none of this information finds its way into the Post’s article. It is probably worth noting that drug companies are a major source of advertising revenue for the Post.
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