August 14, 2010
The NYT tells us that the Feds are investigating drug companies again. It appears that they were making payoffs to foreign doctors to get them to prescribe their drugs.
A brief reference to econ 101 would be helpful here. Economists like it when goods sell for their marginal cost. Trade barriers like tariffs or quotas often raise the price of items by 20-30 percent above their marginal cost. The extra profit created by this gap provides the protected industry with an incentive to engage in corrupt activities like payoffs to politicians to preserve their protection.
Drug patents can raise the price of protected drugs by more than 100 times (10,000 percent) above the free market price. This gives them very large incentives to engage in corrupt activities, so we should not be surprised to find out that they do.
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