Dean Baker in the Guardian, notes the obscenity of drug pricing and Senator Sanders’ solution.
We can do better – and Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a way. He has introduced a bill to create a prize fund that would buy up patents, so that drugs could then be sold at a free market price. Sanders’s bill would appropriate 0.55% of GDP (about $80bn a year, with the economy’s current size) for buying up patents, which would then be placed in the public domain so that any manufacturer could use them at no cost.
Medicynical Note: Unlikely to happen but might put pressure on manufacturers to more reasonably price drugs.
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