As someone with asthma, thank you so fucking much!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This week, GlaxoSmithKline announced it will cap out-of-pocket expenses to $35 for a device for its entire line of asthma inhalers, likely due to significant policy action by the Federal Trade Commission.

The short story is that pharmaceutical companies have been committing an extremely boring form of fraud that enabled them to maintain illegal monopoly protection for their products, and no one in government bothered to stop it.

It essentially created a litigation period before any production started, where the brand and generic producers would fight, and a judge would decide whether the drug’s patents had expired.

In September of last year, the FTC came out with a policy statement asserting that unlawful Orange Book patent listing was a violation of a set of anti-monopoly laws.

GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim - all European companies - saw the writing on the wall and decided to cut out-of-pocket costs on inhalers to avoid the stigma of what happened to the insulin producers.

But even more importantly, now generic producers are starting to litigate against big pharmaceutical firms using the Orange Book patent fraud legal tool.

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