We Will Get Fooled Again

This is the recurrent theme underlying five years of the Bush Administration. They make a public stirring claim about a program or initiative and then quietly do the opposite. Marc Kaufman in today’s Washington Post wrote that “the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mark B. McClellan, said in an interview this week that an ever-growing number of generics is essential to controlling the cost to the government and seniors of the new Medicare prescription drug program.”
Kaufman’s article went on to describe the backlog of 800 generic drugs waiting for FDA review. Once the patent for a brand-name drug expires, generics hit the marketplace at a 60-90% reduction in cost, as soon as they are approved by FDA.
The FDA says they have no plans to increase their review staff despite the backlog and the increase in requests expected in the future. They have 200 staff reviewing 800 requests for generic drugs compared to 2,500 staff reviewing 150 new brand-name drugs each year.
So just who benefits from this situation, which keeps the brand-name drug in the market as a monopoly beyond the term of the patent? Consumers? No. Big pharmaceutical companies? You got it. Where have you heard this one before?