Truth on the Market Op-Ed: The NIH 'Access Plan' Mandate: Central Planning by Another Name
- Jeffrey Depp
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
The NIH must abandon this harmful remnant from the Biden Administration.
Op-Ed Published in Truth on the Market by CFJ Senior Counsel, Law & Policy, Jeffrey Depp:
When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced in July that it would move forward with a Biden-era proposal to require “access plans” for companies seeking to license NIH-owned patents, the decision stunned many in the innovation community. Industry groups warned that this new bureaucratic hurdle would “kill NIH licensing.”
They’re right, and not merely in a practical sense. The policy’s very design embodies the fatal conceit that government planners can anticipate and orchestrate the countless market interactions that drive innovation.
At its core, the NIH policy requires that any company seeking a commercial license to NIH-developed technology must first submit an “access plan”—a detailed blueprint of how it will make resulting drugs or devices broadly available and affordable to patients, including in “underserved communities” and even low-income countries. NIH officials will review and approve these plans before granting licenses and can later revoke the licenses if companies fail to live up to them.
The problem, as Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises would recognize, is that such a system...