The Senate voted 94-1 to make generic drugs more quickly available. On the surface this is a good idea. But without a counter law making drug approval faster and less expensive, the Senate measure will make it more difficult and costly to bring new drugs to market. The patents that currently exist are there to allow companies to make back the millions of dollars that are spent on research & development and the roughly five year FDA approval process. The sooner that the FDA can approve new drugs, the sooner generic equivalents can be made without hurting the inventors.
Just a few days ago, Congress was in a frenzy about software piracy. Why is it more important that Mariah Carey gets her royalties than drug companies get theirs? The Senate doesn't want you using a unlicensed copy of Word Perfect, but they are freely authorizing piracy of drug brands. The more a product is important to the survival of human beings, the more we must keep the government away from the manufacture and sales of that product. Otherwise, we allow them to politicize and destroy something we really need.
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