Enforcing Existing Controls for Drug Pricing

Section One: Critical Summary
With prescription drug prices continually on the rise, especially in recent years, many have posed the question of how to control them. In their article “Why Don’t We Enforce Existing Drug Price Controls? The Unrecognized and Unenforced Reasonable Pricing Requirements Imposed upon Patents Deriving in Whole or in Part from Federally Funded Research,” Peter Arno and Michael Davis address and pose a solution to this long standing and hotly debated issue. The piece is an article published in 2001 as part of a student edited journal from Tulane Law University titled “The Tulane Law Review.” Although written in 2001, the problems addressed in this article hold the same, if not more merit than they did when the article

To appeal to their reader’s logic, Arno and Davis use the elements of diction, structure, and examples, and to increase their credibility they use examples and

For example, in a research paper titled “Perfecting Patent Prices,” author Michael Abramowicz, a professor at The George Washington University, discusses why the current method to control pharmaceutical prices, giving “prizes” to companies that hand over their patent rights to the government, won’t work, and offers a solution. In his paper, he uses one of the points made in Arno and Davis’s article to help articulate his point that current methods are flawed. He states “The most obvious aspect of the adverse selection problem is that prizes might be paid to inventors with commercially unattractive inventions,” (Abramowicz 56). In this quote, Abramowicz is talking about how patent holders have the right to withhold some information about their product, such as its overall effectiveness or side effects, which results in the government investing in drug patents that undesirable baggage they were unable to see. Arno and Davis also shed light on this issue, discussing how the patent holder’s right to privacy opens doors for the exploitation of the government’s patent buying system, which results in the commercially unattractive inventions Abramowicz mentions. Arno and Davis’s article was an important part of one of Abramowicz’s main points, showing the relevancy of the points brought up in their