By: David Taylor, Professor of Pharmaceutical and Public Health Policy at the School of Pharmacy, University of London From a pharmaceutical care perspective, continuing world development presently demands progress on two broad fronts. First, all existing medicines necessary for the people's overall health need to be made universally available . This implies ensuring sufficient volumes of essential drugs are accessible at low cost.
It also requires overcoming the daunting and expensive challenge of ensuring that all people, rich or poor, have access to the professional support that facilitates the effective use of pharmaceutical treatments. Second, without investment in better medicines and vaccines, many health problems facing humanity will never be satisfactorily resolved.
Supporting ongoing private and public pharmaceutical research will demand appropriate intellectual property laws and drug pricing arrangements needed to adequately incentivise genuinely innovative, but inherently high-risk , pharmaceutical research and development.
This is necessary because few, if any, governments have ever channelled public money into such domains without hope of future financial gains. For some analysts, the two goals of improving access to medicines today and ensuring the research-based industry is funded well enough to meet tomorrow's needs are irreconcilable.
In the past, commentators such as the Nobel Prize-winning welfare economist Amartya Sen have argued that in the Indian context , pharmaceutical patents may do more harm than good. But the emergence of modern India as both a major producer of pharmaceuticals - it is now the world's third-largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in volume terms - and a world leader in other areas of knowledge-based enterprise is today an important example of a country seeking to achieve a better internal policy balance between equity and innovation.
This has involved both movements towards accepting the strengthened intellectual property-related provisions needed to foster research-based industry, and new attempts to address concerns about the high - potentially ruinous - out-of-pocket medical costs incurred by the poor and India's notable lack of an adequately-funded public health service.
In the latter area, initiatives such as the National Rural Health Mission and the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna health insurance scheme are indicative of progress. Yet, in the medium-to-long term, more radical approaches to funding a national healthcare system to assure the 'right to health' embodied in the country's Constitution may well prove vital.
Costs and benefits of the draft policy :
At present, national and international attention is focused on the draft National Pharmaceutical Pricing Policy (NPPP) that seeks to reduce the prices of many more expensive formulations. Viewed positively , NPPP 2011, if implemented, could help make quality products more widely affordable, and to rationalise the existing marketplace by, for example, reducing any tendency for medical prescribing to be distorted by financially-linked factors. Nevertheless, the desirability of the suggested new price controls can be questioned at many levels.
Firstly, although better-off people will be advantaged by being able to obtain high-quality 'internationalbrand' medicines at lower prices, the proposed changes would not increase access among poorer sections of society. India already enjoys one of the lowest average pharmaceutical prices worldwide. Arguably, introducing 'ceiling prices' will contribute little, if anything , to answering more challenging questions relating to universal care provision, and the supply of treatments at or even below marginal production costs in the least-wellserved communities.
The latter might, in fact, be facilitated by the availability of higher prices elsewhere in the domestic market. Secondly, following from the above, it may be also be felt that the aim of lowering prices of more costly branded formulations is related more to achieving industrial (as opposed to welfare) policy goals. The full likely impacts of the planned interventions are difficult to assess.
As reported in: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/healthcare/biotech/healthcare/insurance-cannot-stand-in-for-a-public-healthcare-system/articleshow/10987993.cms