NEWS FLASH

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Rx Reform | Dean Baker reports that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) bill would create a prize fund to buy drug patents owned by drug companies “so that drugs could then be sold at a free market price. Sanders’s bill would appropriate 0.55 percent of GDP (about $80 billion 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”:

The country is projected to spend almost $300bn a year on prescription drugs this year. Prices would fall to roughly one-tenth this amount in the absence of patent monopolies, leading to savings of more than $250bn. The savings on lower drug prices should easily exceed the size of the tax, leaving a substantial net reduction in costs to the government and private insurers.