According to an article in livemint.com (the Wall Street Journal’s news partner in India), “For the first time ever, a consensus has evolved on creating global patent databases, monitoring drug prices and encouraging companies to differentially price their drugs, as a burgeoning health care bill pushes governments towards sourcing cheaper medicines.”
The initiative, part of a draft agreement adopted by all the countries in the World Health Assembly in Geneva recently, has been “cheered by public health advocates and makers of generic or off-patent drugs.” The assembly is an apex group of member nations at the World Health Organization or WHO.
The health assembly has, in its draft, also asked member nations to “encourage pharmaceutical companies and other health-related industries to consider policies, including differential pricing” to promote availability of affordable drugs and consider “development of policies to monitor (drug) pricing.”
The concept of differential pricing has been kicking around for some time with some success. Now, together with an up-to-date patent database, we should expect to see more of it. Most people think this is a good idea.
Novartis India Ltd's managing director Ranjit Shahani, who was the president of Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, a lobby of foreign-owned drug makers in India, called differential pricing “directionally positive” and ones that recognize people's varying paying capacity, though the implementation should be through a workable model.
But not everybody is happy.
The clause for “drug monitoring” has failed to impress those of the Jamie Love school of “prizes for patents.” “Monitoring prices is a good step but controlling prices would have been a better and stronger one,” said Kajal Bharadwaj, a lawyer specializing in drug access-related patent issues and added that the health assembly text “legitimizes and validates the public health hedges in government policies that countries like India, Thailand and Brazil have been sticking up for”.
Actually, that’s not true. Clearly Ms. Bharadwaj would like it to be true and so, in typical Big Lie fashion, she will simply keep saying it’s true. This is the same tactic Jamie Love uses when he tells people in Europe that legislation in the United States calling for prizes to replace patents is going to become the law of the land. (FYI – this bill was authored by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Socialist Senator from Ben & Jerry’s and has, as of this writing, zero co-sponsors.)
Here's the complete livemint article:
www.livemint.com/2008/06/01232744/Draft-WHO-pact-on-drugs-cheere.html
