If the pharmaceutical companies get their way with the TPP, the nation will pay through the nose for pills…and some Australians will miss out entirely on lifesaving drugs.
TPP threatens drug prices in Oz
By Bill Rowlings, CEO of Civil Liberties Australia
If you don’t understand the Trans Pacific Partnership being negotiated by 12 Pacific rim countries, including Australia, here’s a clear example of what it may cost the nation in excessive drug prices for decades longer than it should.
What is described here, for one pill, may represent the extra cost for each major ‘breakthrough’ pill while the TPP is in force, for the next 30 to 50 years.
If ‘Pharma’ – the top seven or eight drug manufacturers – get their way, the TPP will allow them to extend the patents on their most profitable existing and new drugs by many years. That will have a number of effects:
- the drug companies will become immeasurably richer, charging exorbitant prices – “inflated pricing” according to expert cancer doctors and researchers – for up to a decade longer;
- some Australian patients won’t get the drugs they require (particularly cancer), and will die years earlier they should, because the drugs are too dear for Australia to afford;
- no benefit will flow to the state-sponsored facilities (universities, medical schools, etc) here in Australia and in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and so on where the majority of drugs eventually patented by Pharma are first conceived.
Will this affect you? Almost certainly yes, because you, a relative or a loved one is highly likely to be affected by some form or other of cancer in the next 10 or 20 years.
http://canceraustralia.gov.au/affected-cancer/what-cancer/cancer-australia-statistics
Here is what some of the world’s leading cancer doctors say about Pharma and its drug mafia behaviour. This is from an editorial in The Lancet, Vol. 386, Number 9992, 01 Aug 2015 (note: costs converted to Australian dollars):
…a commentary published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings was co-signed by 118 US cancer physicians, entitled “In Support of a Patient-Driven Initiative and Petition to Lower the High Price of Cancer Drugs”. The article sets out some sobering facts: the price of new cancer drugs in the USA has increased five-to-tenfold in the past 15 years; in 2014, all new US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved cancer drugs were priced higher than $164,000 per year of use; and recent trends in the medical insurance industry have pushed user contributions up to 20–30% of drug costs, despite the average annual US household income being around $71,000.
The Mayo Clinic Proceedings commentary also draws attention to ways in which the high pricing of cancer drugs could be challenged, including a fair pricing review process after FDA approval, which would allow (US) Medicare to negotiate drug prices and to open up drug imports from neighbouring countries, notably Canada, where drug pricing is around half that of the USA. An online petition, seeking 1 million signatures to amplify concerns in a grass-roots campaign, is gathering momentum.
WHO has recently added 16 new cancer drugs to its Essential Medicines List, including imatinib for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia, which costs around $137,000 per year of use (in the USA). WHO considers the core list to represent “the minimum medicine needs for a basic healthcare system”. It therefore seems depressingly clear that industry’s inflated pricing of new cancer drugs is contributing to a failure of health systems to offer promising new therapies to the very people for whom the drugs are created—cancer patients worldwide.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2961431-3/fulltext
I must declare a personal interest: imatinib* is keeping me alive. I have chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), so for me the TPP discussion is more than an esoteric debate.
Because of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), individual Australians can afford imatinib, though the cost to the community – the price the Australian government has to pay Pharma – is still high. Under the PBS, Australians pay about $36 Aust a month for a course (30 pills @400mg) of imatinib, or as little as $6 a month for people on pensions.
If we didn’t have the PBS, the cost per person would be at least $3800 a month – I know that, because the pharmacist types the amount on my drug pack each four weeks as the Australian government’s way of reminding people how much subsidised drugs cost the nation. So the annual cost to the Australian government for just me and imatinib is $45,000.
Without a government-negotiated “discount” for the PBS, the drug would probably cost Australia at least double that, $90,000-plus a year. It’s even dearer in the USA. While a company maintains a patent over a medicine it can, and does, continue to charge very high prices – prices either paid by an individual (as in the US) or by the community (as with the PBS).
If I lived in India, I could get the identical 30 imatinib pills each month as a generic over the counter, or online, for a handful of Aust dollars for each pill. In Australia, each pill costs the government/PBS about $125; in the USA, each pill costs the patient about $380, based on reliably quoted yearly costs (see above). Exactly the same content of the pill, same size/dose, same name, same effect…but costing people a relative pittance in India.
The reason? The Indian Supreme Court in 2013 rejected the manufacturer, Novartis’s, claim for patent rights. The case was decided on Indian legal/patent technicalities which depended on when India decided to join an international agreement on intellectual property, called TRIPS.
TRIPS, allied with newer ‘free” trade agreements, has further hogtied nations. Together, they serve to concentrate wealth into rich countries (notably the USA and Europe in relation to Pharma), and deprive/delay breakthrough medicines to poorer nations/peoples who can’t afford them, like denying Africa access to AIDS drugs at sensible prices.
Doctors worldwide are complaining about the “immoral” prices of new drugs (these figures are in US dollars):
“In 2013, more than 100 cancer specialists published a letter in Blood saying that the prices of many new cancer drugs, including imatinib, are so high that US patients couldn’t afford them, and that the level of prices, and profits, was so high as to be immoral. Signatories of the letter included Brian Druker, Carlo Gambacorti-Asserini, and John Goldman, who were the developers of imatinib. They wrote that in 2001, imatinib was priced at $30,000 a year, which was based on the price of interferon, then the standard treatment, and that at this price Novartis would have recouped its initial development costs in two years. They wrote that after unexpectedly becoming a blockbuster, Novartis increased the price to $92,000 per year in 2012, with annual revenues of $4.7 billion.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imatinib
* imatinib is known as Glivec in Australia, Europe and Latin America, and as Gleevec in the USA, Canada and South Africa. A “miracle” pill, it has featured on the cover of TIME.
ENDS