Hi AfDers and friends,
With our presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican alike, continuing to deny the need to move toward a single payer health care system, it is left to us to push for what we know will work - universal health care with no insurance companies. I just finished reading on AlterNet an article on presidential politics as that relates to health care and I highly recommend it http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/79281/
"...there is a need to mobilize. History is not made by extraordinary figures but by ordinary people who can move mountains when they believe in a cause and get organized. It has happened all over the world, and it has happened in the U.S. We saw it in the establishment of the New Deal, Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, and subsidized housing, among other programs. These were not just the outcome of President Roosevelt's position, but the result of huge social agitation and mobilization. As usually happens in historical moments of societal change, government leaders were not so much leading as trying to catch up with what millions of people were demanding."
Following is a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research on another aspect of the health care crisis - namely the dominance of pharmaceutical companies on both domestic and international health care. As noted WTO rules allow the use of low priced generic drugs during a health care emergence. Inspite of this the pharmaceutical companies with their ready allies in the American government are trying to prevent the use of generic in poor countries rsulting in the sickness and deaths of thousands of people every year.
The author suggests this: instead of allowing the pharmaceutical companies to do research and production, let's separate the research from the production. Make research a public process with funding being done by the government with the resulting product allowed to be generic right away instead of being patented. Because of monopoly patents HIV drugs in the United States cost as much as $30,000 per person annually. Yet those same drugs can cost as little as a few hundred dollars when generics are used.
We should add a new demand when we talk about health care: What do we want? Single Payer Health care....and research totally funded by the government with the separation of private research from the production of drugs.
David e. Delk, Alliance for Democracy - Portland Chapter 503 232 5495 www.afd-pdx.org
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:48:56 -0400
From: weisbrot@cepr.net
To: davidafd@msn.com
Subject: Drug Patent Rules Must Allow Exceptions for Public Health
Drug Patent Rules Must Allow Exceptions for Public Health
By Mark Weisbrot
This op-ed was distributed by McClatchy Tribune Information Services on Thursday, March 20, 2008, and it was published by the Sacramento Bee and other papers.
Some big pharmaceutical companies are up in arms about developing countries importing less expensive generic versions of drugs for which these companies hold a patent monopoly. But the procedure is perfectly legal, even under the World Trade Organization's pro-pharmaceutical-monopoly rules. The only question is whether these huge corporations - who used their political muscle in Washington to prevent our government from lowering the price of Medicare prescription drugs -- will intimidate other governments that are trying to provide essential medicines to their citizens.
Thailand became the latest target of this bullying last winter when it issued "compulsory licenses" for three drugs. Two were anti-AIDS drugs (efavirenz and lopinavir/ritonavir) and the third is used to treat patients with cardio-vascular disease (clopidogrel). A compulsory license allows for the production or import of a generic version of a patented drug, without the permission of the patent holder. It is completely legal, and in fact the United States has used compulsory licenses many times.
But the U.S. government has sided with the big pharmaceutical companies and put Thailand on a special "Priority Watch List," which could potentially lead to trade sanctions against Thailand. Actual sanctions are unlikely, but Washington and its pharmaceutical allies have made a serious threat. Now that pressure is reportedly being used to block similar licenses for three cancer drugs.
Thailand is a developing country of 65 million people, with income per person of about $10,000, or less than one-fourth that of the U.S. The government estimates that the use of generic efavirenz will enable it to provide this anti-AIDS medicine to an additional 20,000 people, as compared to using the pharmaceutical giant Merck's branded version (called Stocrin).
The vast majority of developing countries have not exercised their rights to compulsory licensing, because of the pressure from PhRMA (the U.S. trade association of the big branded pharmaceutical companies) and the many politicians that are under its influence. This is a tragedy. Former President Bill Clinton, speaking in support of the governments of Thailand and Brazil in issuing compulsory licenses, noted that "no company will live or die because of high price premiums for AIDS drugs in middle-income countries, but patients may."
The pharmaceutical companies argue that they need to protect their patents in order to fund the research and development that produces new drugs. This is partly true - although the majority of pharmaceutical research goes to produce "copycat" versions of other drugs that already exist. These copycat drugs can generate big profits but don't necessarily provide any advantage over existing drugs. The system is so inefficient that Americans are currently paying about $150 billion dollars through monopoly pricing to the companies, in order to get about $25 billion worth of research - much of which is not especially helpful.
So big PhRMA is really making an argument for more comprehensive reform: if the economic and social costs of funding research through private monopolies is so high, maybe we should put more into public and non-profit research (which already accounts for a substantial amount of the research these companies use). In fact, if our own government were to fund the research that the branded pharmaceutical companies now carry out, and allow the results to be used for generic drugs, the research would more than pay for itself. The government would save more than the cost of this research through lower prices for the drugs it buys through Medicare and Medicaid. And the drugs would be available immediately as generics to the rest of the world.
Such economically sensible reforms may be some years off, given the power of the pharmaceutical lobby. But the least we can do right now is to stop this lobby from bullying other governments that are trying to do the right thing for their citizens.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. (www.cepr.net).
Center for Economic and Policy Research, 1611 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20009
Phone: (202) 293-5380, Fax: (202) 588-1356, Home: www.cepr.net
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