Reforming new drug development
So what to do about the misalignment between incentives under the current drug patenting and licensing regime, and public health? (To summarize recent posts in a pistachio shell, the pharmaceutical industry is motivated solely by profit, the most profitable drugs are not necessarily the ones that contribute the most to population health, and the prices are too high for many people to afford in any case.) It is true that if there were an effective international regime to limit pharmaceutical prices, the investment in new R&D would be severely limited. As Thomas Pogge puts it (Pharmaceutical Patents and Economic
Inequality. Health and Human Rights, Dec. 2023):Universal access to new medicines could be achieved through a global
buyers ’ alliance—including national health systems and insurers—which would
tell each originator how much it can charge various kinds of buyers for its
product. Such an alliance could effectively dictate prices, as the originator’s
sole alternative would be to take a loss on its entire R&D investment. But
such a monopsony would greatly reduce pharmaceutical R&D: investors would
not spend billions on developing important new medicines if their return were
wholly at that alliance ’s discretion. Is there a feasible regime that would
ensure the profitability of pharmaceutical R&D without the massive human
rights denials entailed by monopoly patents? So yeah, I get that. Fortunately, Pogge has a proposed solution, called theHeal...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
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