Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17424

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

White JA
Why Doing Someting About ‘Pay for Delay’ Will Have to Wait
The Wall Street Journal 2010 Mar 19
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/03/19/why-doing-someting-about-pay-for-delay-will-have-to-wait/

Full text:

Amid all the ink going to what the proposed health-care overhaul would do, we wanted to note an easy-to-overlook provision that it won’t do: eliminate many so-called pay-for-delay deals.

Those are the oft-criticized pacts under which branded drug makers give something to generic makers stall cheaper copycat versions coming on the market. The deals, which usually involve settlements of patent disputes between the generic and branded drug makers, result in consumers paying the higher branded prices until the generic counterparts arrive.

President Obama’s health proposal unveiled last month included a provison to nix such deals that the Federal Trade Commission didn’t like and the House also such a ban in a separate bill. But it’s not going to happen, at least not as part of the overhaul package now nearing votes in Congress.

The reason is because Democratic leaders are trying to avoid provisions that will kick up even more of a ruckus than they already face in trying to get a reconciliation bill through the House and Senate. Backers think they can return to the delay issue later in the year.

“We’re pretty sanguine that we’re going to be able to get it done this year,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told Dow Jones Newswires yesterday. “We feel like we have a lot of support, that it is growing, and that it is bipartisan.” The FTC charges that the deals cost consumers $3.5 billion a year.

But the Generic Pharmaceutical Association said that banning all pay-for-delay pacts would hurt consumers by sweeping out good settlements with the bad. “Such an across-the-board ban would reduce the number of patent challenges brought by generics, creating an unnecessary hurdle to bringing lower cost generic drugs to the market,” Kathleen Jaeger, the group’s CEO, said in a statement.