With the Biden administration’s recent, unprecedented announcement to invoke “march-in” power under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that would claw back patents in the name of controlling prescription drug prices, National Taxpayers Union (NTU) President Pete Sepp provided the following statement:
“First it was a slew of proposals to import other countries' price controls. Then it was enactment of the tragically misnamed Inflation Reduction Act's price ’negotiation’ authority over Medicare Part D drugs, backed by an unadministrable 95 percent excise tax. Now the Biden administration and its allies in Congress want to tamper with the pro-taxpayer Bayh-Dole law that has helped the United States ascend to world leadership in lifesaving, cost-cutting medical breakthroughs.
Using Bayh-Dole's ’march-in’ rights allowing the federal government to effectively lock away discoveries developed by public-private cooperation amounts to marching over the rights of taxpayers, who have benefited from innovation they helped to fund. The precedent set by this new policy will chill innovation and development across the economy, which already faces headwinds from expired R&D tax relief provisions and overzealous regulators like the Federal Trade Commission.
NTU has long supported the Bayh-Dole law to develop technological wonders that taxpayers underwrite but would otherwise never see the light of day in the marketplace. Those who would mangle this law in an attempt to artificially manipulate prices for drugs or other commodities are ignoring the multiple billions in savings for government health care and other programs that would not have materialized without Bayh-Dole in the first place.
This latest attempt to undermine Bayh-Dole has drawn opposition, as well it should, from thoughtful lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. More Members of Congress should join them and stop this bad idea now.”
For more information on NTU’s work on the intersection of fiscal and health care policy, visit www.ntu.org.