The impression I get is that the American market is what makes all of this a going concern, and that lax intellectual property laws in the rest of the world have set up the situation that we are subsidizing the rest of the world’s healthcare and driving its innovations.
If they do not go beyond American law in the protection of intellectual property I have no problem with this. Quite frankly I think we could stand for a loosening of restrictions here, which would still result in greater restrictions elsewhere. The problem is though, that I have zero faith in Big Pharma to take such a windfall in good grace. I would love to see a situation where they are actually paid in other countries for services rendered, not a situation where they extort anything they can get from humanity while hiding behind lobbyists and loopholes.
Thing is though that we have no way of knowing, because this is all being hammered out in secret, and though we are expected to pay for it, and though our governmental institutions, officials, and legal authority are being subverted in the service of this, we have no say or even so much as a peek.
That was the case a few years ago before Obamacare destroyed contract research in this country. I worked at a contract lab during the 2008 election and we could chart our business based on the Presidential polls -- Mccain up, business volume up: Obama up, Business volume down.
The act of the matter is that medical research is a venture capital dependent industry and there are very few investors that want to risk half a billion in R&D for a small startup firm with one promising compound if they had no assurance that NHS would approve it for use in their programs.
In essence our research was subsidizing the rest of the world because we had a free market with no NHS. Now Pharma companies are building huge campuses in China and Europe to gain access to their NHS systems and our research industry has been gutted.
In the absence of adequate info to decide, my rule of thumb is that anything Doctors Without Borders and AARP oppose is good for the USA.