The batting metaphor concerns cricket, not baseball...
The Obama administration and members of Congress are pressing India to curb its generic medication industry. The move comes at the behest of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, which have drowned out warnings from public health experts that inexpensive drugs from India are essential to providing life-saving treatments around the world.
But India's generic industry has also cut into profits for Pfizer and other U.S. and European drug companies. In response, these companies have sought to impose aggressive patenting and intellectual property standards in India, measures that would grant the firms monopoly pricing power over new drugs and lock out generics producers.
This is the change we voted for! We very much wanted a president the pocket of a pharmaceutical industry that's in the business of milking the state at every level. This is not an exaggeration; this is exactly how it is. If you read Mariana Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths in Risk and Innovation, you find these passage:
The ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Marcia Angell (2004), has argued forcefully that while private pharmaceutical companies justify their exorbitantly high prices by saying they need to cover their high R&D costs, in fact most of the really ‘innovative’ new drugs, i.e. new molecular entities with priority rating, come from publicly funded laboratories. Private pharma has focused more on ‘me too’ drugs (slight variations of existing ones) and the development (including clinical trials) and marketing side of the business. It is of course highly ironic, given this sector’s constant bemoaning of ‘stifling’ regulations.
Economists measure productivity by comparing the amount of input into production with the amount of output that emerges. In this sense the large pharmaceutical companies have been fairly unproductive over the last few years in the production of innovations...
What is important is that 75 per cent of the NMEs trace their research not to private companies but to publicly funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) labs in the US. While the State-funded labs have invested in the riskiest phase, the big pharmaceutical companies have preferred to invest in the less risky variations of existing drugs (a drug that simply has a different dosage than a previous version of the same drug).
As evidenced in this data, Lazonick and Tulum (2011, 9) argue that the US government, through the NIH, and by extension via the US taxpayer, ‘has long been the nation’s (and the world’s) most important investor in knowledge creation in the medical fields’. This knowledge base was ‘indispensable’ and without it, venture capital and public equity funds would not have poured into the industry. They have ‘surfed the wave’ rather than created it.
And so, American pharmaceutical corporationa are becoming nothing more than "knowledge brokers" for drugs developed on the taxpayer's dime, and American taxpayers are paying though the nose for drugs they already paid for. Meanwhile, the head of the state is spending valuable time and energy trying to make even more money for these corporations on international markets. Why do Americans love to get fucked so hard?
[I]t cannot be denied that at the same time that private pharma companies have been reducing the R of R&D, they have been increasing the amount of funds used to repurchase their own shares – a strategy used to boost their stock price, which affects the price of stock options and executive pay linked to such options. For example, in 2011, along with $6.2 billion paid in dividends, Pfizer repurchased $9 billion in stock, equivalent to 90 per cent of its net income and 99 per cent of its R&D expenditures. Amgen, the largest dedicated biopharma company, has repurchased stock in every year since 1992, for a total of $42.2 billion through 2011, including $8.3 billion in 2011. Since 2002 the cost of Amgen’s stock repurchases has surpassed the company’s R&D expenditures in every year except 2004, and for the period 1992–2011 was equal to fully 115 per cent of R&D outlays and 113 per cent of net income ...
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