The Government Can Legally Commandeer Drug Patents
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In Monday’s CNN healthcare debate between Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar on one side, and Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on the other, Cassidy accused Sanders of wanting to expropriate the property of the pharmaceutical industry. “I’ve heard Bernie say in a VA hearing that if we can’t afford a medicine, the government should just take over the intellectual property—it should commander the manufacturing plants, the distribution chains, it should become the pharmaceutical company,” Cassidy claimed.
Cassidy appeared to be referring to a 2015 letter that Sanders sent to the Veterans Affairs director asking him to override pharmaceutical patents on wildly expensive life-saving drugs to treat Hepatitis C. But despite Cassidy’s professed horror at the idea, there’s nothing extralegal or even unusual about the government overriding drug patents. The government’s right to do so is etched into federal law—a law that it has regularly relied upon for more than half a century.