Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A federal appeals court recently ruled that a patent on a successful birth control product is invalid  because the patent owner made an offer to sell the invention more than one year before it applied for said patent.  This sounds like a straightforward application of what patent lawyers call the "on sale bar." MERCK & Cie v. WATSON LABS, 125 F.Supp 3d 503 (D. Del. 2015). Merck is appealing this to the SCOTUS. It sought a "stay of mandate," that is, it tried to get Chief Justice Roberts to rule that the decision would not take effect until the high court heard and decided the matter. But they failed to get the stay, so Watson, the generic drug manufacturer, gets to sell the drug at issue in the US pending further developments. Here's a relevant brief from Watson's lawyers. On July 27, Roberts denied that application for stay in a brief order, providing no rationale. Merck's argument is that what it did more than one year prior to the applic...

In August 2012, the state house in Massachusetts passed its Health Care Cost Control and Payment Reform, something of a patchwork fix-up of the problems that had arisen under Romney's system. The bill, at heart, created a measure for health care cost containment, Between 2013 and 2017, it was to be the policy of Massachusetts that the health care industry should not grow any more quickly than the state's economy, as measured by the increase in the GSP over the same period. Between 2018 and 2022, the official goal was to be that the health care industry's expansion should be below that of the gross state product. How was this to be achieved? In large part by paperwork. The bill provided that every health care provider group that operated in the state must register and regularly report on financial performance, market share, cost trends, and quality measure. The legislation also established a special commission to track price variations. I wrote a brief story on all...

Wikileaks is now saying that it is about to release more information about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It'll be a 30,000 word document. Okay, you're saying "be still my beating heart" wiseguys, aren't you? But this could be significant. A year ago, Wikileaks released its first satchel [e-satchel?] of TPP documents, the Intellectual Property agreement. The participating nations constitute about 40% of the gross net product of the planet. They include: the U.S., Canada, Japan, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Peru and Mexico. Critics of the TPP interpreted the materials disclosed in late 2013 as an effort to get higher prices for drugs, higher profits for Big Pharma.   So: what has Wikileaks got in store this year? ------------------ The above photo shows the leaders of all the TPP member states as a 2010 summit.

Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund --  discontented stockholders allege that at the turn of the century (from June 1999 to December 2001) Halliburton misrepresented significant facts about the company's financial health. Significantly, the execs undervalued an asbestos liability claim. The Erica P. John Fund is an investment fund created to support the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. It bought stock in Halliburton during the period of the alleged deception.  In September 2007, EPJ moved to certify as a class all investors who bought the common stock of Halliburton during the period of the alleged deception,  a period that came to a screeching end with a stunning write-off of $4 billion. In support of this motion EPJ invoked the notion of a "fraud on the market," and presented an expert report by Jane Nettesheim of the Stanford Consulting Group. Netteshein contended that the market in Halliburton stock is efficient, and accordingly th...

If Obamacare fails, one sure political consequence is a revival of pressures for something more sweeping, for a single-payer program. Nowadays advocates of such a program in the US call it "Medicare for all." One of the points they make draws on the supposed efficiency of Medicare. Overhead costs are only 2%. Private insurance plans have overhead at 20% of spending. So the former must represent a better way of doing things than the latter ... right? Holman Jenkins made several valuable points about this in a recent WSJ column, among them these: First, the 2% figure is a dubious one to begin with, since Medicare's overhead costs are in fact picked up by other parts of the Federal government. Much of a private insurer's "overhead," for example, is bill collection. That portion of "overhead" for Medicare corresponds to tax enforcement so it is picked up by the IRS. The 20%, then, contains items the 2% doesn't. [Also, HHS' budget i...

Another term of the U.S. Supreme Court has come and gone. This year as in most years the court has issued a lot of decisions that are, in their own several ways, fascinating. One will be remembered in the history books as THE decision of this term, and it also plays into a number of my own web of obsessions. That would be NFIB v. Sebelius, also known as “the Obamacare decision.” But I’ll put off my own discussion of that one until next week. Today, I’ll do a round-up of five others of this term’s cases, ordered by the date of decision. I will also leave out of discussion an important patent law decision from this term, because I have had something to say of that one here. This leaves the following decisions as of great importance: Filarsky v. Delia (April 17) –This is an unfortunate case in which the court gave municipal immunity to a private attorney with whom the municipality contracted for a specific investigation.   Generally speaking, municipalities...