Are They Allowed to Talk About Drug Patents at the Washington Post?

It seems not. The paper had two major front page stories discussing health care costs and the issue never once came up. This is rather striking since they are an obvious source of both high prices and bad medicine. We are projected to spend more than $250 billion a year on prescription drugs this year. If drugs were sold in a free market without patent monopolies, the cost would be around $25 billion. We would need a different mechanism for supporting research and development, but it is easy to devise a more efficient mechanism. It is especially striking that the article on treating heart disease didn't discuss patents, since it makes several references to expensive drugs and medical devices. The waste due to patent monopolies is not just attributable to the excess cost. The monopoly rents also provide incentives to push drugs and devices on patients in cases where they may not be the best treatment. This is very basic economics that should have appeared in an article like this.

--Dean Baker