WASHINGTON — Forget the push to bring more generics to market or to tweak Medicare’s arcane payment system.
Democrats, newly empowered in D.C. and on the hunt for bigger and bolder ways to lower drug prices, are suddenly taking aim at a far more central part of pharma’s monopoly power: the patents the industry holds on its drugs.
For years, lawmakers from both parties have shied away from addressing the industry’s intellectual property. Muck with a drug company’s government-granted monopoly, the thinking goes, and investments in research and development will disappear. Pharma even helped to scuttle a broad, bipartisan patent reform effort in 2015, in part because the industry worried that even small changes focused on bad actors would open the door to bigger ones.
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