The Congressional Budget Office predicted that a patent reform bill introduced last year could result in federal savings of more than $3 billion over the next 10 years.
The Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2023 targets patent thickets and “product hopping,” which the Federal Trade Commission describes as a strategy to shift patients to a newer, patent-protected follow-on drug when the original is about to lose exclusivity.
The bill was introduced by Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) last January and then advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee to the full Senate the following month.
While it hasn’t moved forward since then, there’s been growing bipartisan support for reforms around pharma patents. And the Federal Trade Commission has begun targeting what it says are hundreds of incorrectly listed and anticompetitive patents for brand-name drugs.
If it became law, the CBO estimated the bill would result in $759 million in federal savings over the next five years and just over $3 billion by 2034, according to its estimate published Thursday.
That’s significantly higher than the CBO’s estimates for the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2021, also introduced by Cornyn and Blumenthal to tackle patent thickets and product hopping. In June 2022, the CBO predicted that bill would result in about $1.1 billion in federal savings over a decade.
The agency noted that its estimates are “subject to significant uncertainty,” as sales figures and the decisions of drugmakers could differ from what the report anticipates.