Johnson & Johnson sued the Biden administration over Medicare’s new powers to slash drug prices, making it the third pharmaceutical company to challenge the controversial provision of the Inflation Reduction Act.
This is why they’re mad
President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022 by a narrow party-line vote, empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time in the program’s six-decade history.
The provision aims to make drugs more affordable for older Americans but will likely reduce pharmaceutical industry profits.
Supreme Court: Hold my robe
Slimy lobbyist: Sure I’ll hold your robe and… whoops how did that big wad of cash get in there?
And his name: Dr. Mantis Toboggan
Woah whoops! I dropped my monster wad of cash that I use for my magnum bribery
Oh noes not the billion dollar company’s profits! Anything but the profits!
empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time in the program’s six-decade history.
This is long overdue. Both my parents are on Medicare and they say the prices for some commonplace things are truly absurd, and it all has to do with the fact that the government legally can’t negotiate the price, so whatever price the pharmaceutical companies set is what gets paid.
Allowing the government to negotiate the price would benefit 99.9% of people and harm only CEOs and billionaires, so you can expect this to fail spectacularly.
Oh no those poor billionaires! They won’t be able to rob people of their savings nearly as effectively. That might even slow down the purchase of their next yacht. How horrible!
Giant corporations big mad that they can’t make Medicare pay whatever price they want.
Bargaining power - ain’t that a bitch?
When the giant corporations sue you, you know you’re doing something right.
Let band together with Canada and Europe to negotiate prices. Maybe they can cut a better deal if they negotiate with leading industrial economies. Seriously, fuck big pharma.
What if charge the executives of the pharmaceutical companies with crimes against humanity. They are intentionally killing people.
Making the medication affordable or life in prison, and once in prisom the companies disbanded and patents made for open use by all companies.
People worry that would be viewed as government intentionally taking over a corporation. It would be… and for good reason.
So they are saying it’s unfair they are told how much they can charge people but it’s totally fine for them to charge however much they want? Fuck that and fuck citizens united.
It is generally regarded as exactly fair for anyone to charge anything they want when selling their property.
Do you really want the government to simply dictate to you how much you can charge for things on Etsy or Ebay?
That’s an excellent argument for why we should have a nationally owned pharmaceutical option. The US government funds a bunch of the research anyway, we should just own production lines as well. Cut out the middle men.
We should set it up as USPS-like competition for the pharmaceutical industry. Then they can change what ever the fuck they want without literally killing people, cuz there will be a publicly owned backup.
when selling their property
Except a significant portion of these drugs were developed with government (taxpayer-funded) subsidies and research grants.
Do you think things sold on ebay and etsy and medications people rely on to live are equivalent?
Don’t forget, pharmaceutical companies get government money to develop these drugs as well. I don’t think sellers on etsy and eBay are taxpayer funded.
But that ignores the nuance of the situation. If the application is to help people survive why shouldn’t the government tell them they can’t overcharge people?
We need to shorten the term for patents and make patent extension more difficult for this reason alone.
“You want us to provide medicine to everyone? How dare you!”
Reading a bit more into this, it may be that the pharma companies have a case, even if the optics are terrible. The drug negotiation process in the IRA seems to be unlike how other countries do negotiations (which the pharma companies are of course familiar with).
In the UK, for example, a government board looks at each new drug, bargains over pricing with the pharma company, and evaluates if the benefits are worth the cost. If they can’t come to an agreement, the government just walks away and goes without the drug (it does this regularly, so it’s not just an idle threat). The government can also get leverage, in some instances, by playing off pharma compabies against each other if they provide similar offerings. This is much like how ordinary individuals or companies make agreements and do business with each other.
In the US law, it looks like the government has put in a bunch of coercive measures, whereby if a pharma company does not provide a price that the government is fair, then the government can compel it to reset the price and impose a bunch of penalties for noncompliance. That’s what the lawsuits are about. I’m not sure why the law authorising Medicare drug price negotiations added these extra coercive elements, instead of simply, well, authorising Medicare to negotiate for drug prices. If the law gets struck down because of this, it would be a dismal example of legislative overshoot.
If my reading of the situation is wrong, feel free to correct.
I think it’s more along the lines of profiteering, these drug companies are charging insane prices for drugs and a lot of the drugs are life saving drugs. The government isn’t gonna tell them they can’t make money off the drug but tell them if a pill costs .001 cent to make and the government funded the research to make the pill you can’t charge 6000 a pill
The rejoinder is that other countries manage not to get ripped off. The US was previously (stupidly) banned from negotiating drug prices, but now that it can negotiate in earnest like other countries, why shouldn’t it get at least as good a deal as other countries, simply by negotiating normally? If anything, the sheer size of Medicare should mean that it can get better deals. So why put in these excess measures that invite legal challenge? It seems strange to me.
no idea but that’s neat, I had no clue that’s how it worked in the UK
This must be awful publicity, right? I certainly don’t want to support them.
I bet it will cause neo-cons to flock to J&J products to help support the poor wittle multinational corporation.
Good luck not supporting them even by accident
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Johnson_%26_Johnson_products_and_services
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Johnson_%26_Johnson_brandsI don’t know what any of those are. I don’t take medicine or pills.
The lawsuit filed in federal district court in New Jersey argues the Medicare negotiations violate the First and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
Unless I’m missing something after reading the article, can someone tell me how this violates the first and fifth amendments?
I would hope this is a good thing, because (as a layman) it sounds ludicrous to justify this suit using the 1st and 5th amendments. Hopefully the court agrees. Doubtful, but I’m naive.
They’re grasping at straws. A majority of this court already ruled that Medicare has the right to compel vaccine mandates on providers who want Medicare reimbursements because Medicare has no obligation to do business with companies/providers that do not meet their rules. The Medicare statute is very clear here.
These companies are actually arguing that the government requiring negotiations violates their “free speech” to set their own prices and is “depriving them of life, liberty, or property” by not buying from them if they don’t negotiate. The reality is that what they’re asking the court to do is to compel the federal government to buy their products at the price they want to sell them at. The inevitable result of such an outcome is that they can charge 100x what they do now and there’s nothing the government could do but spend 100x as much. When it’s put like that, it’s clear how absurd their argument is.
That makes sense. I worry that with how the courts are today, that they (Big Pharma) might win and - as you said - be able to charge even more for drugs, and there’s nothing anyone can do but pay it.
You can read their filing here: https://www.jnj.com/_document/janssen-lit?id=00000189-6a3c-daed-a5bd-fb7fc2a60000
Constitutional argument spelled out starting on paragraph 83:
- The Program violates Janssen’s constitutional rights in at least three respects.
- First, the Program will appropriate Janssen’s patented Xarelto® products for third-party use without providing adequate compensation, a clear physical taking in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
- Second, the Program will violate the First Amendment by compelling Janssen to make false and misleading statements through the Manufacturer Agreement, including that the Program will involve “negotiating” a “fair” price for Xarelto® products.
- Third, the Act would violate Janssen’s constitutional rights even if participation in the Program were voluntary (it is not), by impermissibly conditioning Janssen’s ability to participate in Medicare and Medicaid on Janssen’s relinquishing its speech and property rights.
redacted
Isn’t that a power that every for-profit insurance organization has?
I have often said that the most intolerable offense in America is obstruction of profit, based on the sheer volume of litigation that fits that description.
