Posted on 07/01/2015 6:08:52 AM PDT by GIdget2004
A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.
POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public will get to see them once the twelve TPP nations reach a final agreement and President Obama seeks congressional approval.
Still, the draft chapter will provide ammunition for critics who have warned that TPP’s protections for pharmaceutical companies could dump trillions of dollars of additional health care costs on patients, businesses and governments around the Pacific Rim. The highly technical 90-page document, cluttered with objections from other TPP nations, shows that U.S. negotiators have fought aggressively and, at least until Guam, successfully on behalf of Big Pharma.
The draft text includes provisions that could make it extremely tough for generics to challenge brand-name pharmaceuticals abroad. Those provisions could also help block copycats from selling cheaper versions of the expensive cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics” inside the U.S., restricting treatment for American patients while jacking up Medicare and Medicaid costs for American taxpayers.
“There’s very little distance between what Pharma wants and what the U.S. is demanding,” said Rohat Malpini, director of policy for Doctors Without Borders.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
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.
All this talk about a big farma boy and now jamming it down our throats, wow this gay stuff has really caught on...BIG TIME.
So basically they want to make a go elsewhere, but at the same time want American style protections? Basically to go over the heads of their host countries governments and tell them what to do?
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.
Actually they want to do development in other countries to gain access to their NHS programs (The purchaser of their product) and then submit that research to our NHS. This works for large Pharma companies that have a global scope but not for small startups that tend to be the most innovative. For them the cost of development is so expensive as to be a barrier to entry. As with all NHS systems it is good for the big companies as it limits competition from the small companies.
Ok, that totally sucks. So yet another move to stifle competition.
Thanks for the explanation :)
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