Across the United States, placing bounties on fish is a management method that is used to remove an unwanted population. Bounties involve anglers being paid to catch a certain species, and they are offered for either population reduction or research. There are several factors involved in designing a fish bounty discussed in this thesis. Fish bounties are interesting in the sense that there is no “right way” to offer them. Each bounty has to be tailored to individual populations in order to achieve the desired goals. The first part of this thesis is a review of fish bounties across the United States, followed by a discussion of their effectiveness. The Brown Trout Incentivized Harvest at Lees Ferry is a topic of controversy and is the main subject of this thesis. The National Parks Service began this program in 2020 and is currently paying anglers $33 for every brown trout (Salmo trutta) they catch and turn in to the agency. This program was started in order to reduce the population of piscivorous brown trout at Lees Ferry, for concern they will disperse 60 miles downstream to where there is a population of protected humpback chub (Gila cypha). There are many opinions related to this incentivized harvest. One way to analyze this situation is to look at it from an animal rights perspective. Martha Nussbaum has created her Capabilities Approach to explain what rights animals are entitled to, as they are creatures deserving of the ability to flourish. This is helpful to assess which decision regarding brown trout and humpback chub is best.

Hepatitis C is an infectious disease that affects 71 million people worldwide and causes liver failure and death if untreated. In 2013, a direct acting antiviral drug, sofosbuvir, revolutionized treatment of the disease. Sofosbuvir showed immense promise, but the high price point at which it was launched created access barriers that prevented it from reaching its full public health potential. By 2016, fewer than 1% of Hepatitis C patients worldwide had received treatment. In the United States (US), concerns about the cost of the drug led public and private payers to implement rationing and treatment restrictions that prevented some of the most vulnerable populations from accessing Hepatitis C treatment at all. Through interviews with researchers, patients and providers, and a literature review of grants, patents, papers, court documents, and news articles, I examine the history of sofosbuvir with attention to the ways in which federal funding practices and intellectual property law encouraged the high initial pricing of the drug. I then examine the impact of this drug on healthcare systems in the United States and abroad, and discuss how the fragmented nature of the United States healthcare system has exacerbated price-based barriers to access. Finally, I discuss intellectual property laws as potential mechanisms to increase access. My study underscores how the political reluctance to use well-established federal funding and intellectual property laws has resulted in a drug development system that delivers medications that are so highly priced that the fragmented US healthcare system cannot compensate for the expense. This leads to low access and poor public health outcomes, and a continued failure to contain or control diseases for which effective therapies exist.