What Are Patents?
Patents grant inventors exclusive rights to their creations for a set period, typically 20 years. This exclusivity is meant to incentivize innovation by allowing inventors to profit. However, for essential medicines like insulin, patents often create monopolies rather than fostering competition.
How are Patents Abused and Misused?
Pharmaceutical companies frequently employ ‘patent evergreening’ to extend their market control. By filing numerous patents for minor variations of a drug or related products like insulin delivery devices, they prolong their monopoly. This practice delays the introduction of more affordable alternatives and keeps prices high.
While generic or unbranded insulins should be cheaper, they are often made by the same companies that produce name-brand insulins, maintaining high prices. Biosimilar insulins, though similar to name-brand options, often require separate prescriptions, complicating access.
Pharmaceutical companies use ‘product hopping’ to shift patients to newer, more expensive drugs. Through marketing strategies like coupons and rebates, they encourage the use of costly insulins, even if older, cheaper options were effective. Insurance companies further complicate matters with prior authorizations and formularies that favor newer insulins, forcing patients to switch and potentially increasing their costs.
While there are exciting developments in insulin research, such as oral formulations and non-refrigerated options, many remain out of reach due to industry practices. Big Pharma uses ‘pay-for-delay’ tactics to block competitors and ‘killer acquisitions’ to prevent new technologies from reaching the market, keeping prices high and stifling innovation.
Uninsured patients often rely on manufacturer coupons, but these are typically for newer, more expensive products. Manufacturer-sponsored cost-sharing programs can change unpredictably, leaving uninsured patients facing high out-of-pocket costs.
What are the Solutions?
The high price of insulin is a result of systemic issues in the pharmaceutical industry, including patent abuse and monopolistic practices. While these challenges are significant, public pharmaceutical initiatives and compulsory licensing offer hope for a more equitable future. Prioritizing patient needs over corporate profits can make essential medicines like insulin accessible and affordable for all.
Public pharmaceutical companies offer a promising alternative. Public pharmaceutical enterprises are developers, manufacturers, and distributors owned by the public, rather than by private shareholders. By creating competition in the market, public pharma initiatives, like those in California, aim to make medicines, including insulin, more affordable and accessible.
Public funding plays a significant role in drug development. Between 2012 and 2016, every new FDA-approved drug involved National Institute of Health funding. If the public invests in developing new drugs, we should have better access to them. Compulsory licensing can address patent abuse by allowing governments to authorize the production of a drug without the patent holder’s consent if public funds were involved. This approach could ensure that essential medicines, including insulin, are affordable and accessible.