At the core of the nation’s drug pricing problem is one fundamental fact: Drug companies enjoy government-sanctioned and -enforced monopolies over the supply of many drugs.
These monopolies result from patents awarded under federal law for novel molecules. Patents allow manufacturers to prevent competitors from selling the same drug for 20 years from the time the patent is filed. Given that the process of gaining regulatory approval to market their new drug takes time, research suggests new drugs have, on average, 12 to 13 years of market exclusivity.
Once new drugs are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the monopolies assured by patents enable pharmaceutical companies to charge any price they choose. They generally pick prices that not only cover their development costs, but also generate profits that exceed those of most other industries: for example, the average profit margin for the 25 largest software companies (which are cited as having the same high R&D investment and low production and distribution costs as pharmaceutical companies) was 13.4 percent in 2015, while the average profit margin for the 25 largest drug companies was 20.1 percent in 2015. Drugmakers are also free to raise prices whenever they want at rates they alone determine.
The existence of patents does not totally prevent competition. Often, other companies introduce drugs that are distinct enough to justify their own separate patents and accomplish the same therapeutic goal. This results in competition that lowers drug prices, but often by not enough to make the medications affordable for many patients. In addition, the makers of patented drugs — for example, Mylan’s EpiPen and the weight-loss drug Suprenza — have developed effective mechanisms to extend the lives of their patents beyond 20 years. These approaches include making minor modifications in the formulations or packaging of drugs that have no clinical significance, as well as paying potential generic competitors not to introduce generic drugs.
That said, patents eventually expire, at which point generic drug companies can manufacture the drug and sell it at a much lower price. But even generic drug competition has been weakened recently by generic drug market monopolies, as these manufacturers have bought up their competition. As a result, the prices of old and familiar drugs have risen dramatically. The price of the cardiac drug isuprel has increased more than sixfold between 2013 and 2015, and the price of the antibiotic doxycycline has soared 90-fold over the same period.
As long as drug companies (or a small group) hold monopoly (or oligopoly) power over potent new therapies, there is no free market solution to lowering drug prices. Only a countervailing nonmarket force of equal strength can bring those prices down. Other western industrial countries, recognizing this, authorize their governments to step in and moderate drug prices for the benefit of their citizenry. Some set prices by fiat, while other negotiate with drug companies. In the latter case, the negotiations are sometimes guided by comparative effectiveness analysis that estimates the value of new drugs to patients. Of course, drug companies are free to walk away from such deals, but they generally choose not to, presumably because they still make money from those sales.
Drug companies say their monopoly earnings are necessary to sustain the research and development that produce new drugs. In effect they are saying that they need to be able to charge the very high prices we now see for patented drugs so they can innovate. This raises the questions of how much money society should allocate toward pharmaceutical innovation and who should decide. Setting those questions aside for the moment, we should be very clear about one thing: As long as pharmaceutical companies have uncontested market power to set prices for many patented and generic drugs, those prices will remain a huge problem for Americans and their elected representatives.
