Aggregated News
The White House on Thursday announced its latest gambit to lower U.S. drug prices: a plan to step in and license patent rights to other manufacturers when certain drugs’ prices are too high.
Under the proposed framework, which relies on the White House’s new legal interpretation of a 43-year-old federal law, the high price of a taxpayer-funded drug will be a factor in determining when to invoke a regulatory power known as “march-in rights,” senior officials said.
“The agency that funded the research can then license the invention to a competitor that is able and willing to make it available on reasonable terms,” Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, told reporters Wednesday. “Fundamentally, we are establishing that price can now be a factor in determining … when the federal government can march-in to ensure that we have lower prices.”
President Biden also released a short video where he said the administration was working “toward ending price-gouging, so you don’t have to pay more for medicines than you need.”
The authority to license a drug’s patent rights...