The phrase "a pay for delay" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used in legal and economic contexts to refer to agreements where a brand-name drug company pays a generic manufacturer to delay the entry of a generic drug into the market.
Example: "The court ruled against the pharmaceutical company for engaging in a pay for delay scheme that harmed consumers."
Alternatives: "payment to delay" or "delay payment agreement".
A pay-for-delay deal between AstraZeneca and three big generic manufacturers helped to protect Nexium from competition between 2008 and May 2014.The economic costs of these three strategies vary hugely.
In one of the catchment areas, the nearest health facility is a pay for-service hospital and this delays decision making to access medical care for a sick preterm newborn.
Putting an end to pay-for-delay agreements is important not only for consumers but also for taxpayer-financed programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
For that reason, critics commonly referred to reverse payment settlements by a more pejorative term: pay-for-delay.
A House subcommittee has approved a bill to ban such "pay-for-delay settlements".
Chris Walters, acting chief economist of Britain's Office of Fair Trading (OFT), cites the practice of "pay-for-delay", whereby a firm that holds a drug patent pays a generic manufacturer not to launch a rival drug to preserve the patent-holder's monopoly profits.
The firm's strategy, which the FTC calls "product hopping", offered little in the way of genuinely new medicine, but helped keep generics out of the market, sustaining a monopoly.If product hopping suggests sickly competition, pay-for-delay deals are a terminal illness.
Currently, brand-name pharmaceutical companies can delay generic competition through agreements whereby they pay the generic company to keep its drug off the market for a period of time, called "pay-for-delay".
Jon Leibowitz, chairman of America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is concerned by drugmakers filing frivolous additional patents on their products to put off the day when their protection expires.Another tactic is "pay-for-delay", in which a drugmaker facing a legal challenge to its patent pays its would-be competitor to put off introducing its cheaper copy.
They impose huge, unnecessary costs on consumers: the 40 deals struck in 2012 cover annual drug sales of $8.1 billion; pay-for-delay costs an estimated $3.5 billion a year, according to recent FTC reports.
