Please stop saying ‘innovation’

Perhaps you’ve heard this before: Any idea meant to curb the cost of medicine would also impact the incentive to treat disease, and that, unforgivably, would harm innovation.

Writing in STAT, a pair of Rutgers academics found scores of examples of the drug industry invoking the sacred I word to fight legislation on pay-for-delay settlements, patent rights, cost-containment, and pricing disclosure. And that, according to Michael Carrier and Genevieve Tung, is getting old.

“Big Pharma has cried Innovation Wolf every time Congress seeks to address its shenanigans,” they write. “And the legislators keep coming to defend them. That has to stop. It is past time for the industry to be called to account on using its get-out-of-jail-free innovation card to avoid reasonable legislation.”

Read more.