[Patentpractice] May 21 Senate judiciary committee hearing on affordable medications and competition in the pharmaceutical drug market

[Leigh T]

Hi,

I recently watched the video recording of this hearing and was again struck
by several tactics that seem to be used to attack patents.
One is the use of extreme examples to impugn the system as a whole
(for example, what Martin Shkreli did with raising the price of Daraprim)
and another is repeated misstatements (such as that companies continually
raise prices on "insulin," which is assumed in these statements to be a
single product,
whereas there are many different types of insulin and improvements to
insulin
and this is not even mentioned in the discussion).

I wonder if anyone goes through all the statements in the hearings and
written submissions and does any fact checking, because in some
instances of these anti-patent statements there is a grain of truth
and it would be good to know exactly what that is, but more often it seems
there is a fundamental misunderstanding or misrepresentation
that should be corrected or called out somehow.
Otherwise policymakers/Congress are drafting legislation based
on incorrect facts. Anyway I hope that PHARMA or BIO or someone is
doing that because it's egregious that these misstatements get repeated over
and over again with no pushback. I have seen some responses to some
of the points but think it would be helpful to do a more thorough review.

I'm wondering if anyone knows who might be working on that,
and if they need any help with it.

Sincerely,
Leigh
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