from the about-time dept of The Techdirt Insight Community
A few months back, after meeting UCLA professor David Levine at the Cato Institute conference on copyrights, I read his book, Against Intellectual Monopoly (actually a large part of it I read on the flight home from that trip). Of particular interest to me was chapter 9, on the pharmaceutical industry — as that’s often the industry held up as the perfect example of why aggressive intellectual property laws in patents makes sense. The chapter points out plenty of examples of why things aren’t as great as they seem. As with any monopoly you get some pretty unwanted actions that are more harmful than helpful — and that’s especially true when it comes the tricky games pharmaceutical companies use to make sure they keep their monopoly. Some evidence of that was seen just recently in the scandal at Bristol-Myers Squibb. What I hadn’t realized, was just how relevant this would all be when reading Andy Kessler’s new book, The End of Medicine. I’ve known Andy for a while, so he and I had discussed this book over lunch back when he started writing it in 2005 — and in our discussions I always said that it would be the insurance companies that made whatever dreams of “reinventing” healthcare more difficult. However, Andy insisted that that based on what he was learning, things would get so cheap (following the Moore’s Law pattern) on many of these technologies, that insurance would be taken out of the equation. Instead, the real obstacle could very well be the pharmaceutical industry and their monopolies.
To read “Rethinking Healthcare… Completely” by Mike Masnick click here
